© William Sterling
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This book is free.
Chapter 3 — Do Gurus Wear Seat belts?
Chapter 5 — Meeting the Witness
Chapter 8 — Becoming the Wizard of Is
If there is a mystery in our reality, we are it. How can love leave love?
Knowing Deity can happen as a mere shift of attention, and attention shifts automatically by itself all day long sometimes many times a minute. Actually, finding the Supreme is an un-step, for all we need to do is stop withholding our attention from the divine self that every one of us is.
Especially when we do something “wrong”, we may close our eyes and pretend that we and divine authority can’t see each other.
Can’t see me now!
Each of us always has the reality of the Supreme directly available to us. Our attention can shift naturally to the most important thing we can think about, and we and the Divine then witness each other more and more if we will allow it.
[You may notice that from here on God is capital but he is not capitalized. That is by request.]
Our single task is to let our attention shift by itself to who we really are. Discover who we really are and we find us adorable. One falls in love with the real one of our dreams and also finds this one is always there.
Then when we have let us love ourselves enough, god comes to us eagerly. The eagerness and joy with which god comes to us is not often reported. An experience of god’s gratitude happened one day like this:
–
“I was having concerns about my life. I heard, “I will take care of you”, and I saw in inner vision a crescent moon figure, luminous yellow orange with calm and great love projecting to me. I asked ‘Who are you?”, and it said, “Your divine self”.”
“A few days later I was driving to an appointment. I asked my divine self “How can we change the world?” “
“Divine self said “This has to be passed through to full god”.”
“Then there came down through divine self into my chest a huge golden glow that moved into my torso, arms and legs, and then up through my head through my crown chakra and straight up as blinding white light, the presence of overwhelming love.”
“God said, “Let them have this experience”.”
“It is basically indescribable, but in some attempt to help provide what god asked, here is what it felt like.”
God expanded out of me into everything I was seeing — the trees and everything that was between me and the trees, the space formerly perceived as empty was vibrating with love.
Then god said, “I know everything you’ve been through, I know everything about you, and everything you have been through I have been there with you.”
Then he said “I know every cell in your body.” I was fragmenting with joy.
Then he said “I have been waiting for this more than you have. I have you at last.” I began to feel the overwhelming joy of god to be with me. It was astounding and kept getting bigger, his joy kept increasing, his joy at my knowing him fully and finally. I was filled with gratitude and amazement that the source of all love was increasingly fulfilled by loving me, and the awareness of safety and love I felt went completely beyond description. I could not believe it. Wasn’t this backwards? Am I not supposed to be the overjoyed one? By desperately claiming god, I was making him happier than I could conceive. More than I still can conceive.
I began thinking of describing this experience to the friend I was going to see as multiple kinds of energy including a physical glowing love. Then god said “There is much more”, and then he said “This is all the god that you can handle right now.” The feeling of regard and protection was beyond belief. He loved me beyond measure so much that he would protect me from being loved more by him than he knew I could tolerate. Even though I did not know what that could mean.
This experience was so integrating and safe and pure and calming in the midst of infinity, that I was still driving. I passed a lake, and I was thinking of putting my wrists into the cool water, and trying to feel the consciousness of god in the water, and god said “You need me right now.” I know he meant I needed this experience of the golden glow of full god, and not any other expressions of god such as trees, lakes or anything else. He said I needed the total ineffability of god filling me right now. God was mother, father, protector, doctor, friend, all beings I can imagine who have regard for me.
God feels like a personality and a universality at the same time. There are personal and impersonal aspects of god simultaneously perceived. The personality of god was ultimately so. Not just an ultimate personality, but ultimately a personality, and there felt like a difference. The personality of god is not an abstraction. It is, if this can be imagined, casual.
The universality of god was impersonal, everywhere present and infinite as perfection.
To restate, because it is so deeply wonderful, god is not a person, but he is a personality. A friend who just wants to know us, have us know him, have us be him and be together. A parent who has lost us for millions of years and now has us back again as we have now opened to Him, and he is more fulfilled than before. God is fulfilled when we come back to him, this feels impossible to relate, but it was clear in the midst of the experience, and I can feel it now as a continuing reality. I know it just is, and I am no longer discovering it.
The feeling was the golden glow of energy and love, and the hugest feeling of “all right” I could possibly fit in to my consciousness. The relief was inexpressible. Finally, I thought, finally, oh my god, finally, after longing so long, after so very, very long, and so very, very much yearning, I am With, I am There, I am Here, I am inhabited and surrounded by Love, and I am He, I know who I am, and we are Him. That is to say, I know that god and I are god.
The knowing was that it has always been like this, it is like this now, and it always will be like this. There is nothing else because there cannot be anything else.
This is enough, this is more than enough, this is right, this is It. I was crying.
I deserve this, you deserve this, every particle of creation deserves this, and they all have it because they all are it.
We have always had it. The experience of not having it, has been part of having it. Even the experience of not having god is created within the extreme reality of having god. The actual components of the forgetting of god are disclosed as having always been particles of god. The forgetting of being god is also made of god. The boundaries of the experience of not-god-ness are actually made up of god-ness. And the actual experience of not god is made up out of the materials of god. There is absolutely no way out of it. This is a PERCEPTION, not a conception. It is a procession of EVIDENCE. It is as if the monolith of truth dropped onto a beach and you took somebody to it and showed them and said, “SEE, there it is. This thing exists, touch it. And when they do, they have to say “Yes, whatever this is, it exists.”
The question of “‘What came before you, god?” is not even slightly interesting. It doesn’t come up since just isn’t actually askable.
I said “God don’t leave me”, and he said “Where would I go?” I said, “Then please don’t let me leave you.” He didn’t say anything, but he sent the knowledge that this is up to me as it always has been. This is the only part of my experience that did not feel perfect.
On the way home from the appointment:
God seems to manifest to each of us in a way consistent with our personal identity. Perhaps we like to tease. On the way home on the road where god came in that day, he flagged me down and asked for a ride. God was hitchhiking. That was the feeling of it. It was an inner visual of this golden glow by the side of the road with a godly thumb out.
Of course I said “Climb aboard”, but then I had to purposely go “through” divine self to really feel god there again like before. When I did feel him in the same full way, I was looking to see if god went out into the trees like before, but he hadn’t. When I thought of him ‘out there’, he suddenly was out there, and I got the clearest feeling that I could and should ‘direct’ god where to go. This is so far out of the paradigm I grew up with that I didn’t know what to think of it. But god was quite happy about it.
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“Last night’s meditation went on automatic pilot for 2 hours. It was simply magnificent. Awareness was a cathedral for 120 minutes of eternity. The goddess manifested sitting far away, as at a church. She was remote, ministerial, a faraway priestess. She appeared as a vision in violet, so beautiful, radiating love and an indescribable vast presence of all is well, perfection, timelessness.”
“Later she moved inside me. It was a remarkable vision, totally spontaneous. I was recipient, no impulse of my will was there. I became a “slide” of me, a flat curved transparent image around my inner cathedral, and especially over my face; my face was the goddess’, my eyes were those of the goddess. But then, the inconceivable occurred. The goddess became another such image, or slide, or transparent sheet precisely like mine, but it was ‘her’ identity, and mine was ‘my’ identity, but they were still the same identity. “
“Then there were two identical images, hers sliding down over mine, and when the goddess image was a precise fit we were both the goddess.”
The Supreme Pronoun
Given the undeniable personality of god, it is impossible to refer to god as “it”. Several protocols have emerged in modern works as alternate referents to god. Some authors…
— Use “He or She” or “She or He”.
— Use “She” in one place and “He” in another.
— Use “God, Goddess, All-that-Is”.
— Use “Mother-Father God” or Father-Mother God”.
— Don’t use a pronoun ever, always use “God” even if they must torture a sentence.
Since god usually manifests to me as male I have in general chosen the male pronoun in this book, but not to diminish the overwhelming, beautiful, nurturing love of the divine feminine. The religious deposing of the female god in the last 3,000 years has done tremendous damage to civilization and is thankfully being repaired in our time as many begin to realize god’s universal personhood. The other options for god’s pronoun seem cumbersome, and I intend no offense with a way to smooth the narrative by using the male pronoun in reference to the diving.
We may quite easily believe we know ourselves too well to love ourselves. But it is more likely that we do not know ourselves too well but instead we “know” a set of what R.D. Laing in the 1960’s book The Divided Self called “false self systems”. We may knew only who we show to others. These are the parts of us that are obvious to us, because they suffer and call out for help, thus making much inner and outer noise. The non obvious part of ourselves is our true self, and it only whispers so at first we do not hear it. This book posits that this true inner self is itself divine.
This somewhat frustrating fact that god starts talking to us in a whisper is explained in A Course in Miracles by the statement, that the holy spirit whispers because there is no conflict in him. Shouting and pillars of fire are therefore not necessary.
At first we can’t hear much because there is conflict within our self. As one finds out who one really is, this conflict dies, and then we can hear god quite clearly. Two people in conflict shout at each other and nobody hears. Two people in love merely gaze at each other, and hear everything the other feels.
The advice to “love yourself” is backwards. We might try “yourself love” in place of this. Self comes first. Then the love. Find the real self. Then the love of self is just there.
We are impostors
We have been trained from birth to be spies in our own lives. This is why the self we know from childhood is often not liked by us. We know incoherently it’s not real. You know you are not authentic.
We should give up trying to love ourselves until we uncover who to love. When you uncover the one to love in you, it becomes you, and then it is love at first sight. It’s automatic. It is love at every sight. You can’t wait to wake up in the morning to hang out with yourself.
My experience for years time was waking every morning to say “Oh, god.” Once things changed I woke every morning to say “Oh, god!”
When you fell in love in your first romance did you think, well, there they are. I really better fall completely in love with them. It’s going to be hard but I can do it. I want hearts and flowers and romance and songs in the spring and everything. Sigh, I know I can do it, let’s go.
Of course not. You couldn’t help it. They say you get attacked by love, you get shot by an arrow, it’s a shock, it rolls you over.
Or maybe it crept up on you slowly, but it came with the force of lava. One day you realized your heart was in flames.
It’s like that. One day you look in the mirror and there is no mirror, it just disappears and there you really are, the most beautiful human you have ever seen and you see below the skin, below the appearance, it is somehow all rolled into one perception, there you are, and where have you been all my life!? Wrinkles? Acne? The most beautiful things I have ever seen.
It may be a lovely shock. How could someone like me love someone like me? How could I even like somebody like me? That famous bon mot by Groucho Marx that he wouldn’t join a club that would admit him has done quiet damage to many selves. Rueful recognition isn’t healing. As a Transcendental Meditation teacher used to say to us, “We are all doomed to bliss”. Yes, and we are all doomed to true self. If we speed up the (inevitable) doom of the ego, the little self, to real us, then we move up what is masked by the postponement of the inevitable. God.
So, isn’t it therefor a paradox that the self before we know what it is has the power to withhold us from God? God so loves the world that he gives it the power to deny him. He doesn’t want somebody that he forces to love him.
Would you?
Once you fell in love in your first romance, then did you discount everybody else? Did you fall in love with only “him”, or “her”? Of course not, The cliche of love is that the true lover loves everything. Everybody’s beautiful. Everybody’s sweet, you are in love.
One ‘task’. One ‘task’ only. Who am I really? Then all else is done for me. From that point, All That Is takes over and we simply inherit everything there can be. It’s an inheritance; but nobody died. Somebody suddenly lived.
A friend in a meditation group once said to me, “For a long time now I have been experiencing life as a series of hints.” The hints are the true self whispering to the less true self. One thing is to pay attention to the hints. It might seem like paying attention to the hints is doing something, but since we are always paying attention to something anyway casually shifting our attention is really not like doing anything, it’s not doing very much.
Our attention shifts all the time, it’s part of being human. How about the way billboards catch our attention? Do we do anything to look at it? Does anybody think, “Know what? On the way to the airport I really want to see the billboards.” Isn’t it more like we realize we are looking at a billboard after our attention shifted to it by itself? Our awareness can be simply that we are aware, and then our attention automatically shifts inside. Once it shifts itself inside, there are the hints. Once it shifts inside as awareness. Once you shift inside, aware that you are awareness watching awaremess go inside of itself.
Again, this is really not about steps that you do, the steps are done for us automatically, once we simply allow a certain style of attention that is already there. The correct or useful style of the attention is built in, and it actually isn’t anything that we go out and get. Really, it’s just something that we sort of trip over. This style of attention could be known simply as noticing. Since we already automatically notice without trying, usually without noticing, it’s not doing, it’s not-doing. All we ‘do’ is let the attention fall on things. Letting is undoing, not doing, allowing is just being. Allowing attention to go where it wants to really go, is one of the correlates of who we actually are. And where it wants to go is within. When the billboards grab our attention, that’s not our desire, it’s the desire of the people who earn their living by making billboards. They study for a career in how to grab us. This god does not do. He does not intend to grab us, he intends to let us find who we actually are, and then, there he is.
Louise Hay said that “The only thing over which we have any control is our current thought.”
And the currency of each thought is the currency in which we invest our attention. The currency of our attention is of immense worth, and if we let our attention shift without watching it, we let it default to advertising, to the billboard makers, to the marketing activities of a world designing itself to hooking our attention by increasingly sophisticated means.
We let it default to noticing only the things in our lives that try most loudly to claim us. God does not attempt to fight off those claimants on our behalf. He never says “what about me?”, because for god it is all about us. Once I was fretting in a discussion with him, and he said, “Whatever you want.” That shut me right up, which wasn’t his objective, but I wasn’t learning anything by complaining.
Another time I was transported by divine bliss and in raptures of delight and I said, “Oh God, you can have me if you want me!” And god said, “I can have you if you want me!” I’m still embarrassed about that one a little, but I also find it to be extremely funny and I believe god did too. I had the most important thing in the universe precisely backwards. He had replied with a kind of rueful smile.
So wherever I let my attention place itself without watching it, meaning be unaware that it is happening, I invest growth in the target of my awareness. I finance the expansion of what I am seeing. And if I don’t monitor where my attention goes and let the most vivid things capture it, I am giving away my most valuable asset. I am essentially inviting its theft.
When we allow our attention on our intention, we have started to allow our journey back to the divine. Eventually awareness will wander inside us. And it will eventually, if we continue allowing it, notice the witness of our attention, which is our god self.
Let’s try not-doing. Let’s let. Let’s let attention shift around where it will on its own for a little while and just see what happens. Let’s watch it shift. See what it does. Where does that little doggie of attention go when we are watching? What corners does it sniff in? What’s it snooping on in the yard? Where does it go? Isn’t it always looking for something? What actually is it looking for?
Here instead we suggest the attention is more like a puppy. Yes it wanders, but it is always up to something. It is much more delightful to watch a puppy than it is to try to control a monkey. And what a joy it is do discover that in seeming random scamper this adorable puppy is just looking for the true us. If we follow it when it wanders inside us it can show us us. Everybody should closely watch a puppy sometime in their life.
Our attention is our most important thing. Our attention is sacred. We should watch it like we watch a sport. Where is this ball of attention going to go? How? Why? Who kicks it? Who catches it?
A quick note on “why”. Asking this usually causes pain, and I recommend that you forget about asking why about anything important. Asking why it’s cold in the living room is fine to investigate. Asking why we don’t know who we really are yet, is not fun to ask, it’s dangerous, and ultimately useless. And it isn’t paying attention to whether or not we already know.
It’s basically a guarantee not to find you if you ask all the time why you haven’t found you.
We all know that the ego is that little voice that’s always getting our attention and telling us to watch out. Actually this is poor advice because what we should be doing is watching in, watching until the attention wanders IN by itself, and then we watch in, not out. This is the voice that’s easy to identify, because it’s always frightening us and saying and how to be safe by listening to this yammering little scared immature kid that seems to care so much for us.
When the attention wanders In, when the wandering mental puppy happens to look inside, then we know to look, watch him, see what happens. And notice also that the ego isn’t interested in what’s inside you. He won’t go in with you. He can’t.
You can mentally take him, the ego, and perch him on your left or right shoulder. I recommend you be kind to him, because he is obviously easily terrified. Then give him a job. You can say “Eggy, I’d like you to drive. I’m telling you where to go, but you can run the brakes since you’re pretty good at being scared.” You might let the ego make the shopping list. You might assign it to help you do the practical things. Give some assignments, and see how it does. You can then sit back and learn to smell the roses. Without worrying if they need to be clipped, fertilized, mulched, sprayed, photographed, or pruned. Eggy can worry about all that.
If Eggy feels useful, and knows you are not out to kill him off, it may very well settle down and stop pushing God away from you. Scaring the ego, threatening it, being angry at it, cajoling it, don’t work very well and take a long time. While we are here in 3-D, an ego is actually very useful. It gives us time to do the important things like nothing.
Hire yourself a president of your Me corporation. “Wanted: One Ego to run the obvious while I lean back and find out what really matters.” And you stay Chairman of the Board. You set policy. The ego executes, well, pun intended. You’ll need to run out and get a desk to put your feet up on and simply watch what’s going on, like a good business owner does. Successful owners pretty rarely drive the trucks, although maybe they should to see how tough it is. It’s not a great analogy, but let the ego drive the trucks, the job basically stinks, and let us make the big decisions.
Another strategy is to recognize that the ego is God also. (See the chapter on Boundaries.) Let it know that you know that, it will be stunning news to him, and then the ego will know there is no place to go except into service to who you really are. Immediately, everybody’s happy, and you can get on with your spiritual essence.
So getting rid of the ego is easy, because it’s not who truly are. You befriend it, and be kind to it because this serves both of ‘you’. There is no need to worry about the ego. To calm down the ego, treat it with kindness just like how to calm down everything else.
“Everyone would like to meet God. Even those people who don’t believe in Him would like to meet him. If they believed it was possible to speak with God they would be the first ones to sneak on the line.” (Paraphrased from his talk “Shaking Hands With God”)
-Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
Frequency
Growing in identity as God is a seamless continuum of change. In the digital age we tend to think in binary, either I’m God or I’m not. Either I’m in the 3rd dimension or I’m in the 5th dimension.
But really, growth is much more gentle and continuous than this; I experience that I slide up and down. Up in frequency, down in frequency, up a little, down a little, all day long. Change in frequency changes my reality. Change in frequency changes what I see as real. And some of the reality states are more comfortable than others. Each frequency change alters what we perceive as reality. When we are really down, we could think of what Thaddeas Golas said in The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment,
“What am I doing in a place where this is real?”
Once I asked god if infinity was enough. And he said “Of course it’s not enough, that’s why there are an infinite number of them.” So there is plenty of space to move around in; if we change reality when we change our frequency, there is much room for different reality experiences to take birth in.
The truth found inside is the same for each person who finds it. But for each individual the exposure and disclosure of it may be quite a different process. The way out is the way in, but there are lots of different ways in.
Ancient traditions emphasize gaining enlightenment (Ascension) all at once in a burst called Satori. Digitally. ‘Binaryially’. Snap-to-grid. But currently mass ascension is occurring in a continuum of increasing bliss. It is more of an analog situation than a digital, binary one. We are not ever 100% in one ‘level’ of ascension.
At the bottom of the frequency band we are in, we experience the world as physical and we interpret ourselves as physical also. As our frequency increases we start to perceive our expanded Self, AKA Higher Self. Continuing expansion permits us to experience ourselves more as our Soul, and then we may perceive ourselves at an angelic level and ultimately God claims us as his truth and our truth.
It’s a sliding scale. Frequency changes with mood and time of day and energy level; when tired we are usually at a slower frequency. When love predominates as an experience, our frequency is quickened and we can live at more expanded states of beingness. Love is an infinite frequency.
So there are faster frequencies and slower frequencies in the universe. The common tendency is to refer to them as “higher” frequencies and “lower” frequencies. I would rather say “faster” and “slower” because there is the obvious unhelpful assumption that higher is better than lower. There is quite enough judgment of better/worse in the evaluation of consciousness. I suggest more spiritual is not more better, it’s just more faster. Faster feels better. Faster frequency is stronger, more flexible, hardier, more able, more multi-tasking, calmer, more expanded, more loving, inclusive, fun, cooler, and an incredible cosmic relief. It is just really worth it.
Not to slow our frequencies, but did the bible say someone was coming to “Judge the Quick and the Dead” ? I suppose the dead were the slower guys, and the quick are the faster ones? We could be only one of them? Dead or Quick? In keeping with the theme here of a sliding scale of frequencies instead of static categories, perhaps slower is deader and quicker is more alive. This goes with our experience also, we say, “I woke up dead”. I sure woke up extremely slow but not stopped. Or, I’m moving fast today. A good thing. I’m moving fast today, I’m at a high vibration, I’m really alive! Catch me if you can. Catch me if you want to be less dead.
Don’t you think that’s why we call livelier a “quickening”? The dictionary definition of quicken is quite fascinating,
“…to revive; restore life to: ‘The spring rains quickened the earth’ “.
They sure do. And since we dipped “down” (quickly) into biblical consciousness, let’s go back ‘up’ and realize that a quickened frequency Raineth Down Grace From The Heavens Upon Us And Lo, We Are Made Pretty Darn Happy.
It’s actually very important to chose terms about frequency carefully since better/worse thinking is always a slower frequency. If you make better/worse thoughts as moral ones rather than efficacious ones about ascension frequencies, you are standing on your bootstraps. What does vocabulary matter? What do word choices matter? Words are sounds and sounds are frequencies. So it’s ‘better’ not to use better. It’s more effective not to interpret higher frequency as morally superior. The whole superior/inferior dialog should be chucked.
For a good treatment of how words we choose affect our thinking, expectations, and the reality we create, you might want to see Hidden Language Codes by R. Neville Johnston.
The quicker we are the more we don’t comprehend judgments about better or worse. The less we understand judgment and the less we enclose judgment. It just falls away. Judging judgment is a waste of time. Just climb the frequencial ladder and much that is not useful is less present in your reality. Its a lot better not to be better, and its a lot faster to be faster.
I like to think quicker/slower over better/worse or higher/lower.
Please notice how we are staying out of blaming religions for inculcating in the vocabularies of the entire human race, and hence deeply embedding in the very consciousness of the entire human race for thousands of years, that more spiritual is higher and higher is hierarchy, and humans higher in hierarchies are better humans and better means superior and it means you are better than others. And if you are not higher, you are clearly lower, and lower is disgusting. Sorry.
Heaven is higher, earthly is lower. Heaven is more good and earth is more bad. Mud is not good, clouds are good. Mountains are spiritual, valleys are deadly. (It’s a valley of death, not a mountain of death.) So wind must be better than water, sky trumps fields, up bests down, tall is better than short, more holy, actually.
Therefore, don’t eat because food is at ground level . Obviously this whole way of thinking is ridiculous. I’d throw it all out.
Frequencies are an experience, they are not identities. Our true human identity is the fastest frequency there is. This is who we truly are. Don’t believe it, just ask god (he is laughing now about this as he writes it) and the only variable is that an infinite frequency can experience a lower frequency as its reality. (“What am I doing in a place where this is real?”
Thigh-slapping guffaw from god right now. Very unseemly.
Because He doesn’t ever, ever, seem.
Hate
Does not exist. It’s just slow love, in the same way that matter is slow light. (I see I couldn’t slip that one by you, then, very good. I’ll come back to it.)
Slow love is clumsy. If you think that hate really exists, notice that all the time it’s trying to tell you that it isn’t real. It is always is trying to tell us that it really is masquerading love.
Poetry is not for everyone but following is actually the clearest way I have found to express this quite subtle and counter-intuitive finding that love and hate are the same.
Walking A Way
w sterling
november 2006
walking is like
nothing else
as much as it is like
not walking
not planting first foot
not pushing off
not shifting haunch
not swinging next foot
not walking has a not
every single where walking does not
have a not
not walking is a complete exact faithless copy
of walking
every thing you precisely do
when you walk
you precisely don’t do
when you don’t walk
there is no difference
except the un
not eating is not like walking or like not walking
it instead is not chewing not tasting not swallowing
making it more like eating than it is like walking or
not walking or
anything else or
not anything else
not walking is the closest thing there can be
to walking, its unskin its closest
impossibility
so nothing
is as much like everything
as nothing
now come with me
off the cliff,
why hating is
like nothing else
but the similar obsession
of love
*
© William Sterling
We could say, what seems to be hate, is very slowly vibrating love. It’s ignorant love. It wants exactly the same closeness that love wants, but it does not know how to go about it. So it tries to control, and imprison the object of its attention so it cannot get away.
If someone loves me, they can’t stop thinking about me. If someone hates me, they can’t stop thinking about me.
Hate can obsess over me by cruelty, even torture, manipulation, all the objectives of which are to keep me as close as possible. If somebody really hates me, they don’t want to leave me alone. If they technically leave me alone in 3D reality, their thoughts don’t leave the thought of me alone. If I really hate myself, I also refuse to leave myself alone. If I hate myself, everything’s all about me. Who I believe I am never leaves my awareness. It is only the illusion of me that I can hate, because it’s impossible to do anything but love who you really are, as soon as you find you. Bump into the real you in a dark room and all the lights come on everywhere.
When I am hating the false me, it’s difficult for other items to get into my awareness because my awareness is fully clogged up with who I think I am and what I don’t like about it. I am therefore always trying to change me. I become my priority project. I am my own obsession. If I am a supermodel I might think my lips are too thin, and so all I can see are my lips. It is just as if I loved my lips, I look at them all the time, but in distaste. I see my lips in the mirror, but in the mirror image of appreciation, IE, distaste. Precisely like appreciation, but reversed. There are two mirrors in my vanity. The one that shows me my lips, and the one that shows me that distaste and appreciation have identical effects.
When a pickpocket sees a saint, he sees only the pockets. It’s all about to what do we attend. Our attention is where we attend. Its the school we send ourselves to. What we intend is where we attend.
But if I love myself, I am free to think about anything. I need not think about myself all the time. I am free to investigate and appreciate nature, nurture, everything. I can give attention to others, get the light out of seeing their perspectives which may be very different from mine. Whereas if I think I hate them, I am always trying to force their perspective into being the same as my own because I don’t trust my own. When I love myself, everything else becomes interesting, too. Appreciation flourishes inward, and outward everywhere.
Anton Checkov is supposed to have said, “To a chemist, there is no such thing as a bad smell.”
I’d like to say that, to a lover, there is no such thing as hate.
If I don’t like myself, I don’t actually trust my own perspective. Because nothing seems to be working out, so how could my perspective makes sense. Ideologues and fanatics of all types insist everyone believe what they say they believe, so that it will help them feel they are right. And if they are right, then they are okay, and if they are okay, they can like themselves. These behaviors are doomed, and the way back from them is hardly easy. Of course, the fanatic, the torturer, the ideologue, the hater, have all trapped themselves in deep suffering. Which is ironic, but irony is always lost on ideologues.
One wants to think the image of the self imprisoned hater is funny, but these spiders are trapped in webs, and it is just very sad. The only solution for severely lost ones, is their own pain. If they hurt themselves enough by hating others, they might stop it. Just like we, who eventually turn our own beautiful love on ourselves, these ones do the same, turning their inverted love upon themselves resulting in ether shocked realization and change, or death. Love always reflects back to the self, whether it is the highly vibrating love or the slowly vibrating love of hate, it always goes back home.
When I am in love with self, all this bizarre complexity is not present. Love is infinitely simpler than its apparently opposite, the tricky, meaningless, hurtful, tedious, banal, and illusory inverse double we call hate.
Truth
This seems like a great time for a discussion of truth.
A few years ago I asked my higher self “What is true?” The answer came back in the snappy way the higher self always replies, “Everything is true.”
I dismissed it as my lower mind fooling around with me. It seemed remarkably unhelpful.
But over the years that reply has improved. Even when I first heard it the answer was etched in emphasis, a kind of word glow. Which everything has from our higher selves. You may perceive it in a different way, but everyone having a chat with their higher self experiences that each reply has a ring, a specialness about it. Visual or auditory or in other ways, in a genuine reply from the higher self this quality is always there.
Everything is true. What a bizarre idea. Once you seriously start searching for truth, it’s addictive.
It’s crazy, really. Truth is like crack cocaine. Once you taste it, you can’t stop. If I’ve got it, you don’t. If I’m right, you’re wrong. If we both have it, don’t you make any changes because you’ll make me wrong. The historical beat goes on and truth becomes a killer. The killer.
But If everything is true, the props go out from under the truth podium. A whole host of nice things suddenly happen. Tolerance. Agreement. Harmony. Alliance. Security. Peace. It’s a long and welcome list. It’s true. And then and I think only then, we can forget about truth. We are the truth.
Hopefully it’s coming clear that he only way out of the human dilemma is to discover you. And the easiest way to discover you is to let your attention go into free fall, inside of you. Since letting isn’t doing, its not-doing, there really isn’t anything to do to find you. It’s more like saying “Lets see seeing see.” Watch your attention look around in there. See what is. Attention and watching are the same, and the attention wanders on its own. Which is why you can notice that that there are no steps to is.
Next we will take a look at how boundaries seem to separate us from our real self, and therefore from God, but really don’t.
*
Boundaries are technically not there.
We believe boundaries exist between us and God. We view God as infinite and ourselves as in a finite box, and we often think God is everywhere except within the boundaries of our circle of self.
Lets look at boundaries from the point of view of consciousness.
Just after 500 BC the Greek Zeno, asked if for an arrow to hit a tree doesn’t it first have to go halfway? And from there does it not have to go halfway to the tree again? Does it not then traverse an infinite regress of partial flights? Does it ever hit the tree? Zeno’s paradox has bedeviled impractical people since then.
The physicist Werner Heisenberg proved in 1927 it is impossible to know simultaneously both the position and the momentum of a subatomic particle. It’s usually called Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, but I beg to differ a little. Because in accordance with the rest of the thought systems in this account of god, it must be so.
Itzhak Bentov in his1977 book Stalking the Wild Pendulum, On the Mechanics of Consciousness extended this finding of Heisenberg’s by imagining a pendulum swinging back and forth. He analyzed what happens to it at the top of its arc, imagining it slowing down and slowing down at the top of its swing until like Zeno’s arrow it is traversing distances as short as those in subatomic space. Bentov shows that at the point where the pendulum reverses its direction we obviously know it’s momentum exactly, it is zero. And then in accordance with Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Bentoz asks himself, then what do we know for certain about its position?
And then Bentov takes us off into outer and inner space in the following amazing passage:
“Thus, we have now established that the momentum of the pendulum at that point Is zero, that is, we know its value very precisely: It’s zero.” (Emphasis is Bentov’s.) He continues, “But we have said before that if we know precisely the momentum of a particle, then its position becomes diffuse and completely indefinite. That is, the pendulum can be just about any place, even at the end of the universe. Yes, but it has very little time to get there because this whole event occurs in zero time. So there we go again. The pendulum has to disappear in all directions at infinite velocity. It will have to expand very rapidly into space, like a balloon, and then collapse just as rapidly.”
“Having done this, it comes back, picks up speed, and goes about its usual good-natured business as if nothing had happened. None of us would suspect the leisurely pendulum of doing such a wild thing when no one is looking? But then again, one cannot rely on appearances.” (Page 53, second edition paperback.)
None of us would suspect a lowly arrow not arriving at its target either, and perhaps for a different reason, because its target doesn’t exist; please see below.
Oh, and perhaps it is important for our slightly more intellectual comfort that Bentov says on the same page to introduce his elusive pendulum,
“There is a principle in physics that states that any event that is not prohibited by the laws of physics should happen!” (Exclamation point his.)
For our purposes here we are interested in what Bentov’s ideas say about boundaries. Imagine a boundary exactly at the top of a pendulum’s swing. Just as the pendulum is about to touch this boundary, in quantum space, the boundary is not touched because the pendulum cannot be shown to be there then. The pendulum cannot define a boundary location it is incapable of touching.
Next is another discussion of the insubstantial nature of boundaries in consciousness.
If we expand a picture of an innocent looking boundary and examine it deeply and thoughtfully, it can be seen that trying to intuitively touch a boundary is intellectually tricky.
The nature of a boundary no matter where found in consciousness seems to shimmer. It’s thereness, it’s assumed reality, comes and goes. And if the edge of the edge comes and goes, the boundary expands and collapses. It fully disappears and fully returns.
You can play tennis on boundaries, basketball, and so on, without giving them a thought.
But when you do give them a thought, you just can’t trust a boundary all the way.
You can trust them only up to a point.
An asymptote is a line that approaches a boundary but never touches it. It smoothly sidles up to a single other line but can’t by its mathematical nature go beyond it, or even touch it. This analysis we can prove, and it depends on our understanding of non-quantum tools of the regular universe we see and manipulate, not proofs of uncertainty in the quantum world.
To show how asymptotes work, we can look at points on a graph. Each point has an “address” based on its location on a grid. The address is two numbers, the first how far over the point is horizontally; the second is how far up it is vertically.
Locations of points are in a format (x,y). X holds the distance on the grid the point is in a horizontal direction. Y holds the distance on the grid the point is in a vertical direction.
This point’s address is (5,9).
Suppose the marks on horizontal and vertical lines are inches. As stated, the value of X is the number of inches a point is to the ‘right’ or ‘left’ on the horizontal dimension. The value of Y is the number of inches each point on the line is ‘up’ or ‘down’ on the vertical dimension.
Points on the grid can be located by an equation. Here is a graph of a mathematical equation of a line.
Y dimension, up/down
X dimension, left/right
No matter how far the above curve is extended in either direction, it never contacts the boundary lines as you can see so clearly in the picture. This curve would have certainly been a favorite of Mr. Zeno were he around to see it. Here is how it proves itself to us.
Every point on the curve has a mathematically computed location on the horizontal direction, and the same point also has a location on the vertical direction.
The equation ‘tells’ the curve what to do. For every point it provides the X address and the Y address. A little like when a new road goes in and the post office assigns all the addresses on the road at once. In this particular road graphed above the post office decided that each house (point) has an address where whatever the first number is, you divide it into 2 to get the second number. I just picked 2. It could be 3, 5, a thousand, but 2 makes an easy one to show.
The equation for this is XY=2.
It can also be expressed as Y=2/X.
You can pick an arbitrary ‘X’ number – how far to the right you want to have the point. To get the corresponding ‘Y’ number you divide whatever its X is into 2. See the table below to show this for a bunch of points.
So if we pick a point 5 inches out horizontally, then we calculate the vertical point of the point 🙂 by 2/5, which is 2 fifths of an inch. This is because Y = 2/X, per the post office’s required calculation. For this street, this is just the way you do it. And address has to have 2 numbers to find it; where it is horizontally and also where it is vertically. So the point that is is 5 inches out is 2/5 inch up, AKA .4 inches vertically.
The equation, like the post office, has the power to pick out or provide the address of EVERY house on the road, or every point on the line.
Or, you could speficty the same rule this way “Vertical Inches = 2 divided by horizontal inches”. Same same. The post office doesn’t care how you compute it, so long as you follow the same rule, no matter how you say it.
When we know the rule (equation) they use for this neighborhood, all the house owner has to tell us to find him is the rule, and ONE of his numbers, either vertical or horizontal. But we have to have both numbers, so, knowing the rule, we must compute the other number to find him. The rule can work both ways; give me your horizontal, I’ll find your vertical. Or give me your vertical, and I’ll find your horizontal.
It you are going to someone’s point (house) for, to, say, find god there, the owner may say, “In our neighborhood the rule to find us is X times Y=2. My X is 6. Or he can say, “My Y is 3!” You can compute the other. Of course, he could give you both numbers, but if we can find god at his house, we don’t mind doing a little math.
So, never mind, just go with it, the math is done below.
Here is a bunch of points that make a graph like above:
Put these on the graph like this:
go over 1 inch and up 2 inches, put a dot
go over 2 inches and up 1 inch, put a dot
Do the same for the rest:
over 3 and up 2/3
over 10 and up 1/5
over 4 and up ½
over 5 and up 2/5
over 10 and up 1/5
over 1,000 and up 2/1,000ths of an inch
over one million inches and up two millionths of an inch!
Do you see what is happening? As we go ‘over’ more and more, the horizontal gets bigger, and the vertical location of each point is getting smaller. A real huge horizontal measure gives a real small vertical location.
We can pick any horizontal measure and find what the vertical measure must be and put the dot on the graph where the over and up inches intersect. Once we know the basic shape, we can choose some locations outrageously far away (a million inches) to see what the curve does at extremes.
Look at the graph and see how when you go ‘far out’ horizontally you get very close to the horizontal boundary but can you see it can never, ever touch it? The bigger the big the smaller the small. And that’s it, it can’t do anything else. It’s far out alright, and as it goes far out it goes far in.
We are spending a lot of time on this just because it’s so cool. And it shows us something very simple and interesting about the universe. If you already know this kind of thing, you can skip all the math, but you might want to ponder the result with me.
The curve can become very very close to the vertical boundary, and very very close to the horizontal boundary, within quantum distances, and it cannot touch, or it wrecks the very simple math of division. And division hasn’t been wrecked since 3rd grade, has it? You don’t have to be a geek to appreciate all this. It’s just division! It’s quite wonderful, actually, and quite mysterious isn’t it? On this particular matter do the math people and the mystic guys shake hands? I googled ‘math and mystics’ and did not find anyone, but I’ll bet they are out there. If we had one of their X addresses, we could find their Y, so their house, if they published their neighborhood post office rule.
Does the horizontal boundary exist? It can’t be mathematically touched, when it goes into quantum distances and bumps into Heisenberg (actually can’t ‘bump into’ Heisenberg, sorry, because nothing can really bump into anything). Where all bets are off, does it matter if the boundary is there? At least by the method of an asymptote, it can’t be proven that it’s there. In fact, doesn’t the point we are plotting when it gets quantum close go anywhere or everywhere, just like the pendulum. Since we can’t know where the point is, how can we know where the boundary it is approaching is located?
You could assume as we see an address ‘converging’ on a line but never touching, that this line is the ‘boundary’. But isn’t it kind of a leap of faith? Are we not rather jumping ‘over’ the quantum distance between the assumed point location and the assumed boundary location?
We don’t usually take math on faith, but if we can’t show no address ever touches the line we call a boundary, what is our assumption that it doesn’t? Bit of a ‘leap’ is it not? A very, very, very tiny one to be sure, but a leap nevertheless. As close as the curve can get, we still jump off it and catch hold of the ‘boundary’ it seems to be going for. Let’s not think about where Zeno would say we go when we push off.
It’s pretty obvious anyway, is it not? This is hugely simple math, it’s just division, and like my friend said, “It’s so simple, it eludes me.” Where’s the point? Where does it go? What is the point?
What if we go to infinity on the horizontal dimension, how close does the point get to the X boundary? What is 2 divided by the number bigger than any number? It is smaller than any number, is it not? And what could this mean? Does the point vanish? Does the boundary vanish? Do they both vanish?
For the point to ‘touch’ the boundary, one of the addresses would have to become zero, yes? But it never becomes zero. It gets infinitely close, whatever that means. It logically can never touch. Reminds us a little of Zeno’s arrow never hitting?
Imagine an infinitely sharp needle moving across the surface of a perfectly smooth tile towards a second similar tile adjoining the first. When it reaches the boundary between the two tiles, if the needle is infinitely sharp, at some point it must not be able to rest on both sides of the two tiles at the same time. A blunt needle could touch both at once. A needle infinitely sharp would fall through. Even if the tiles are infinitely smooth, these two infinities collapse together and fall into a place where the boundary between the tiles is nothing. Our needle could never be on the boundary.
If the tiles were infinitely close, whatever that may mean, and the needle infinitely sharp, I’m not sure anyone could say what happens, but it doesn’t sound like contact.
The needle falls through into a nowhere that cannot exist. The boundary between our tiles disappears.
Yet another place where boundaries can seem to exist, but actually cannot.
In the year 1202 AD a guy named Leonardo Pisano Bigollo published a book on mathematics containing a brain teaser. (He came to be called “Fibonacci” but I don’t find anywhere why.)
One of the best Internet sites I find to introduce it is here,
https://math.temple.edu/~reich/Fib/fibo.html
It says,
“…hidden away in a list of brain-teasers , Fibonacci posed the following question:”
“If a pair of rabbits is placed in an enclosed area, how many rabbits will be born there if we assume that every month a pair of rabbits produces another pair, and that rabbits begin to bear young two months after their birth?”
“This apparently innocent little question has as an answer a certain sequence of numbers, known now as the Fibonacci sequence, which has turned out to be one of the most interesting ever written down. It has been rediscovered in an astonishing variety of forms, in branches of mathematics way beyond simple arithmetic. Its method of development has led to far-reaching applications in mathematics and computer science.”
The results of this innocent pastoral – spiritual farming? – musing have moved many from brain teasing to awe.
Once the bunnies are all sorted out ,the way they reproduce gives rise to the following scheme.
The site “Math is Fun” (really?) – http://www.mathsisfun.com/numbers/fibonacci-sequence.html –shows us how in a fairly short discussion.
The Fibonacci Sequence is the series of numbers:
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, …
The next number is found by adding up the two numbers before it.
— The 2 is found by adding the two numbers before it (1+1)
— Similarly, the 3 is found by adding the two numbers before it (1+2),
— And the 5 is (2+3),
— and so on!
Example: the next number in the sequence above is 21+34 = 55
It is that simple!
I can’t imagine why anyone would get the idea to make squares out of these numbers and put them together like this, but someone did:
I am a wee bit troubled by this spiral business. It was hard for me to figure out how they draw the spiral, E.G. what is the rule of it. I finally see it looks like they are connecting two diagonally opposite points of each square with a smooth curve, and I suppose when you keep doing this square after square, you do get this particular spiral, with this exact sort of curving. Why they do the diagonals, who discovered this, and so on, I haven’t researched, but it does seem inescapable. For that matter, who decided how to place the squares? There seems to be a rule for that also. But for that matter, who decided to add up successive pairs of numbers? Well, Fibonacci. But for that matter, who disclosed the whole idea to Fibonacci?
Well, bunnies.
Then someone asked for some reason what happens if you divide
the resulting pairs of numbers down the chain. I.E. going in order left to right, starting at the beginning of the sequence, and divide the second number of the pair by the first. Simple division again. You get this:
We just have to go with this. It came up.
Not too interesting. But wait! What is happening in the rightmost column? Don’t we have something eerily like an asymptotic thing happening? Does this not look like the numbers are ‘converging’ on some value that looks like it may be a ‘boundary’?
Even so, if this isn’t too enthralling, what about this? Somebody found that the Fibonacci sequence does not have to start off in the beginning of the numbers with 2,3. Nope. Look at this one:
You can start with any numbers at all! And the second one doesn’t even have to be greater than the first! Now this is enthralling. The thing calmly resets itself and goes off to the races. And where does it race? Where does the sequence of divisions go?
It seems to go to the same asymptotic ‘boundary’ the other one does.
When writing this, I had to keep getting up and walk around the room. At first laughing, and then wondering, and then gawking. What exactly is going on here? A sequence of numbers, starting with any two in the universe, giving birth to a new number by a simple step, and then one more number computed from the two by another simple step (division), and no matter what starting numbers or how far we go, any set of starting numbers in the universe have their relationship – the divided pairs – go the same way to the same ‘place’. All ‘families’ of numbers seem to converge on the same value. Bunnies, amoebas, fruit flies, any natural pairing generational sequence, does the same thing.
One man’s awe may be another man’s yawn, but for me, this inspires awe.
For my purpose here, what’s significant is the boundary conditions implied by this reality. We’re not going to get into the debate about implicate order, whether this points to a universal intelligence or not, I’d like to examine the boundary implications of this sequence of quantities that is obviously very deeply and very inescapably built in to the very structure of manifestation. Bunnies, for goodness sakes have shown us the way. The darn thing is embedded, excuse the pun, everywhere.
So here we go. When it was noticed that the ratio of dividing two fibonacci sequence numbers in sequence converge onto a standard seeming value, this ratio was called the “Golden Ratio”. The golden ratio is said to be approximately 1.6618034. It looks like if we keep computing it, it will go on forever. Like Pi. So they just truncate it to a few places, even though, I submit, it is not any place at all, and we will come to that.
Now we are can see the implications of the Fibbonacci number for a discussion of boundaries in nature. Somebody decided to graph the convergence of the Fibonacci Sequence Golden Ratio. Here is a picture.
I don’t think I’m pushing the rope to suggest it looks a lot like our asymptote graph. Does the Golden Ratio value loom like a boundary in the same way an an asymptotic equation generates a curve converging towards a limit? The Golden Ratio graph is even simpler than the example for our asymptote. It’s just two numbers which come out of an orderly simple series, divided by each other. And we get this mystery.
Look, another boundless boundary. No matter how far you extend this series, the lines get closer and closer to this ambiguous ‘barrier’, but can’t ever contact it.
I wanted to unbind boundaries, but now that’s done, we need to go back to the Fibonacci spiral for a minute.
And suddenly fascination turns to divination. A really very simple step of mathematical playing around turns up a pattern at the very core of the world. It manifests magically a picture of how nature grows. And it’s gorgeous. It’s abstract, concrete, simple, beautiful, and everywhere. You can make your own list; sunflowers, snails, cabbages, and it goes on.
Why? Why is it that adding two numbers and then dividing the resulting two by each other, and repeating this, turns out a picture that is everywhere in creation, no matter what is being created? It’s a godwink, a “folks, heads up, everything’s beautiful, and connected, and abstract isn’t abstract, is concrete.” And more.
A simple computation has esoteric effects. The Fibonacci sequence converges on a number that isn’t there. And at the same time hidden in this sequence is a wonderfully beautiful form we find everywhere in our natural world. Nothing is hidden from humans. In plain sight is a natural form that simple mathematics can demonstrate provide yet another brief that we and the universe are unbounded.
A picture of the fun at the base of it all can be seen like I did one night.
Whirligig
w sterling
october, 1982
So the moon is out hollering white love into echoes upon
cold fields, and the dew does
Yes the moon is a stick of white margarine
smarting under the intelligence that turns
whirligig handsprings in the morning glory cups and
mushroom caps of tonight’s magic spree
It doesn’t cost anything to be crazy
*
© William Sterling
Boundaries are trying to tell us they are optional. Look deeply enough at anything and hints arise that they all merge into everything else because they are not really separated by “boundaries”. We don’t have to be quantum physicists to suspect it. But it’s maybe quite comforting that current physics endorses it. As I understand it, today no physicist certainly disputes Heisenberg’s uncertainty certainty. But we do not have to understand quantum physics to appreciate the examples above, which are from the world of ordinary thinking and the world of ordinary world.
But why should we have to look at things suspiciously to see if they are really there? Well, can’t intellectual maturity be defined as learning to look beyond appearances? Can the same be said of spiritual maturity? We are not here to remain spiritual infants. We are here to see. There are mysteries only to make us grow up.
And the time of mysteries is over. Everything we wonder about is hidden in plain sight, and we can see a lot by simply looking as the Yogic prophet Yogi! Berra said. Or not. Nobody’s forcing us to look at anything, and looking below surfaces doesn’t mean the surfaces aren’t marvelous as they are. But humans are beings by definition unsatisfied. We can look at the astonishing human curiosity at play in the mathematicians who looked deeply into number sequences and realize we’ll never stop. Humans will never cease wondering. We’ll never stop inquiring, asking, pondering, what? Pondering, as it is often simply said, “What in the World is going on”?
Musing once on how unrestrainable is human thought, and how large the playground seems to be, but wondering whether big is big enough, I asked God if infinity is enough. He said, immediately as always, as if he is just sitting there waiting for the question, which he is,
“Of course it’s not enough. That’s why there are an infinite number of them.”
Well really firstly, where is God, anyway? The saints and sages all insist He is in all locations. Maharishi, once asked where to find God, said,
“The first time you find him, he is where you find him. After that, he is found everywhere”.
In his delightful way of talking, he put the accent on the ‘where’, which maybe makes this abstract matter more concrete, as if he were indicating, god’s really just in where. Where is god? He’s where. Maybe we’re not to worry so much about the ‘every’ part of everywhere, since it raises this troublesome infinity thing. But “where”, we can visualize. Where is really here. He’s here, he’s here, oh, he’s here… Every place the eye falls a where is there.
And, according to Maharishi then, god is there too. Here is where, there is where, every where a where where.
Perhaps the biggest and most obvious matter is that insofar as we perceive a limit, there is much evidence that it is not there. And if God is everywhere, which many people can readily admit, they just can’t admit god is inside them, too, because they believe he’s outside of them, on the other side of a barrier witholding them from union. Not saying how we all got into this bizarre fix, but to follow that trail, you might want to look at religions.
So then, if there are really no barriers, isn’t what we think of as a separation, actually made of the same stuff as everything else? How could it not be? If there are no boundaries to create an actual difference in status, in being, must not everything that exists be made of the same constituent? Isn’t the seeming boundary also composed of god substance, isn’t is perceived to be constructed of God substance, and then the boundary between me and God cannot separate us. Because it is also God.
And then I realize that I am officially surrounded. And I am invaded by the infinite. I can’t get away from god if I wanted to.
Reality rightly understood interpenetrates me with the ultimate, with the Supreme, with the deepest possible eternal regard, constant attention, with eternal love, partnership and delight.
Given this astonishing and simply mind blowing finding, redemption, and prediction, and with those above understandings of boundaries as conceptually elusive, we can go on in the next chapter to look at ways that the universe creates also have implications for the flexible, optional nature of boundaries that seem to separate us from god.
*
Everyone metaphysically asleep does something to dull the pain of this disastrous slumber.
They throw themselves into their their work, they throw themselves into their family, they do many things to stem the misery of not knowing who they are. One thing or another is chosen to dull the sharp edges of ignorance. They eventually throw themselves accidentally away.
We select something to act as a drug. Something is picked to numb and distract us from facing the meaninglessness of everything, and we invest that chosen distraction with the meaning we seek. It is a most human thing to do. People may throw themselves ‘body and soul’ into loving someone else and sacrifice their life to them. Or they may choose extreme sports, money, alcohol, heroin. These are substitutes for who we actually are. Humans cannot for long bear not knowing. And the most tragic, deadly situation is when we do not know what we do not know. We don’t know we have a true self to know and we are in a blind double bind.
There has to be something we do to mask the mask of hiding from everyone because we fundamentally hide from our self. If we go literally crazy within these masks, then that is what it is. Something has to happen. We make it so.
The call of our true self is postponable, but eventually undeniable.
Whatever we use as novocaine for our unintended and tragic ignorance, it is a text message from the inexhaustible light in us that will not allow us to forget our true selves. Once we are forced to recognize the symptoms of our own cover story, we are closer to recognizing the light of who we truly are but at the same time unfortunately for some this may be an appalling shock and too late in this life to solve.
I am old, my children have left me, and the purpose of my life is gone. I can’t do professional sports now and I don’t know who I am anymore. I don’t know what is wrong, without work to do I’m not myself, I have to find something to do.
Empty activity can be burial by busy. Eventually the umpire of our life screams, “You’re Out!”, and he says, “You have to be In! That’s why we call these Innings!”
Where is in?
You could imagine there is an inner cave in our awareness. There is a tunnel to it. There is no door, the access is open. Occasionally as we tiptoe by it on the way to some outer experience we see a pinprick of bright light deep inside it. Over time, it gets brighter and more enigmatic. It might wave like a flashlight. Somebody is in there, way, way deep, who in the heck is it?
Eventually we have to go and see in the dark.
This is our cosmic game of hide and seek.
I keep my self just out of reach of me. But pretty soon I have to find out who is in there.
We bury our eternal self from view during this time of outer running away before we awaken to the possibility, the inevitability, the grace, the mania, to return to our inner home. This is what is truly meant by “looking for love in all the wrong places”. We all do it until it becomes intolerable. Then if we don’t acknowledge this call to self and begin doing something to welcome it into our attention, our life falls apart. It has to because the simple imperative is to clear everything away but the kernel of me, the true me. You have to. And if you cannot, you may kill yourself because it is simply that bad if you can’t figure out and accept who is you.
It’s important to state that none of this means you cannot be a wonderful parent, immersing yourself in your family in service, or do other loving and wonderful things for the world. But if these activities are pure cover for inner self abandonment, then I believe pathologies manifest in some ways as well. By abusing loved ones we once served, and similar acts that are incomprehensible. Incomprehensible until we understand their cause. Their cause is inner emptiness. You cannot forever plug infinite lack with good works. If those external good works are not balanced by inner discovery, they will twist and manifest into grotesque parodies of themselves. The events potentiated are dramatic puzzling headlines of persons warped into terrifying violence. They are screaming at everyone else to tell them what is wrong and if it doesn’t occur the frustration leads to punishment of everyone and also self.
These behaviors we class as inhuman. Somehow we recognize that disconnection from our core self severs our definition as human. That who each one of us really is, is basking internally and eternally in the unity of being and that our language reminds us thus calling ourselves human beings. We needn’t call cows cow beings, because cows know it.
We somehow know that our true self is our actual source, our very continuity as awareness and that since all source is unified to recognize who we are recognizes every other as ourselves. By not maintaining a live connection to our internal source, we sever a connection to our human family and to the rest of creation. A yogi meditating decades alone in a cave is profoundly more connected to the rest of humanity than a financier surrounded by other people but ignorant of who he really is.
A disconnected human suffers unendurable pain, and eventually will cause unendurable pain.
On Lightworkers
For lightworkers, Ascension can be our drug. Service can be our drug. These things can be our fabricated distractions from our truth. And the higher we get in frequency, the more subtly we may choose our distractions.
Our path is our distraction.
There is no path. Although the assumed ‘path’ is a much healthier distraction than alcohol or whatever else, it has a similar though non as dramatic effect in our lives for we use these things to signal us we may not be home yet. All the sages say this. It is one of the things they say that we all find most mysterious. When the Guru says, “You are already there”, we say to ourselves, not me. This is actually one of the final hurdles to coming home. The Guru knows we don’t know, but he must tell us so and we must go through the paradox of being away at home.
It’s like inner voice mail. “Hi, this is Bill, I’m not home right now, but you can leave a message.” The problem is that it’s Bill calling.
God and how everything happens
It is said that there are three steps god takes in creation. (This is paraphrased from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.)
God says:
I
Know
Myself
The last word is what creates the universes. It automatically triggers an infinite progression of objective knowing that successively creates more to know as it knows. This is doubtless what cosmologists call the Big Bang. And it all happens instantly. Technically, it is the logic of creating as it is done by god. It happens in a logical microsecond and it is really no big deal. It’s just built into the basic mandates of intelligence to elaborate, ramify, expand, and express, just as we do. When we get confused by all the dazzling lush complex variation, it can help us relax to be patient with the creator. Do we really need 40,000 varieties of spiders? He does.
Creation also doesn’t happen at all, but let’s not go there right now. However, for the intrigued, in the appendix there is a further analysis of this in a mystical poem that came to me in 2001.
Maharishi says that in causing creation god identifies in order the knower, the process of knowing, and what is known. The Infinite subject begins to know finite object as all one singular infinite Being.
This explosion of the seemingly material has created a map for us of where everything and we came from.
We have made this apparent journey. We have moved from pure being to formless self awareness to material creation.
Somehow along the way we get distracted. Creation is so fascinating that we forget who we are. We forget everything. The trip for most of us becomes a shocking detour of illusion and pain.
So can we see that getting back is simply backing up?
It’s not exactly like this but it doesn’t hurt to see it this way. We have gone from step 1 to step 3. Then we go from 3 back to 1. We return to 1. We return to the One. The hot news is that even though we don’t remember we walked that walk, somewhere in us knows with certainty there is a way back. And the hotter news is that we don’t have to walk it back ourselves.
The immense cosmic spiritual wink is we don’t have to do anything to get back.
“…when the goal is finally achieved by anyone, it always comes with just one happy realization; I need do nothing.” A Course in Miracles chapter 18
That statement scratched my head for many years until I realized it as below.
When we go through the creation steps 1,2,3, it is like we stretch out a being-band, a rubber band of being. As it stretches out it exerts on us a pull back to our source.
We want to experience creation and god wants to experience it through us. We want to go to 3. It’s built into us. It’s fine. It’s god’s grace that we stretch out from formless unity to formal materiality and we find the amazing creation. So we do go out and he is in glory with us because we are allowing ourselves to appreciate him more and more and he is thereby able to appreciate himself more and more through us his creations. As mentioned this is from the Urantia book.
But our own personal rubber band of becoming is stretched and stretched.
So this is why there is no journey back. We don’t need a path. The rubber band is connected to our oragin. We have helped stretch Being all the way to Doing. We have chosen it as a glory of creation. How to get back? How to go back to being number 1?
All we do, all we can do, is let go.
When we let go, Being itself brings us back like a rubber band snapping us back from where we experienced we went but didn’t. One of the trickiest parts of this is you can’t be convinced you didn’t really go anywhere until you return. Sorry! opposes common sense! Confusing.
Gurus say there is nothing further to ‘do’ when we realize this truth of return. You just let go. That’s it. And you let god bring you back to his infinite “I Am”.
Maharishi Yogi said, “Running fast contains within it the ability to run slow; the ability to run slow…contains within it the ability to walk, and the ability to walk contains within it the ability to stand still”.
He said, “It is all about learning to stop”.
I have not read any saint who told us about the rubber band. Maybe they did, and I missed it. Maybe they used different metaphor. Obviously when we let go, the rubber band brings us back to where we “came” from.
Our culture says “Let go and let god”. We say “Let it be”. The rubber band is love. Love is the gravity of being. Love brings us home. All we have to do is stop what we think we are “doing”. We have “flown up” in the air from the ground of being as we were supposed to. When we stop flapping around, love lets us “get back”, “get back to where we once belonged.” And we thought the Beatles were a rock band.
We have actually not flown anywhere. We have remained in pure being and the perception of flying is described by all seers as a movie. Yoganda is particularly compelling in this image of images. He says life seems like him as a movie over and over in Autobiography of a Yogi.
We go into the movie but we do not go into the movie. We are there, yes, in the movie, struggling to get out where we aren’t. But the illusion has no hold on us. We have the hold on ourselves.
We seem to perform the holding on, within the illusion. It is our last activity before we realize there is no activity.
The last doing we think we are doing, is holding on to who we aren’t. Holding on feels like stopping, but it is not stopping. Holding on is a doing, it is an activity we do not know we are performing. It takes a certain actual effort to keep our fingers closed around our illusions. Letting go is simply ungrasping, which is much easier than grasping. When we ungrasp, finally we are at zero point of energy and since we are really not doing anything, we can then know the non acting reality of eternal being.
In actual deeper fact, we are not holding on, but this is good enough for now to say we are doing it, because thinking we are holding on is what lets us tell ourselves to let go. An illusory act within the illusory realm, that lets us be removed from illusion. This is an amazing loving paradox of the pathless path. God will not let us be lost eternally. We are eventually summoned home.
Guru Mooji is wonderfully good at validating and netting out these complex seeming understandings with marvelous simple one liners. He said of this, “The truth is that nothing has ever happened.” Hard not to laugh.
We do not even let go, god lets go for us when we convince him we are ready by discovering who we truly are.
And by meditation this we do by saying what God said, “I know myself”. By knowing myself I erase all the apparent boundaries in the universe, I reenter the boundless, return to infinite love and let the supreme reclaim the long wandering weary me.
Then god’s eternal statement “I Am” becomes “We Are”.
We started with gurus and seat belts. If they do wear them, it is only to make us comfortable. After all, they know they are not going anywhere.
*
Magic happens when you begin to love self.
We could say it is the ultimate magic because loving yourself gives the Supreme your permission to approach you. As explained previously for pretty clear reasons, he does not do so until you say so.
This is perfectly reversed from legacy religious teachings. Teachings that we need to beg god to come to us. To minimize and abase our self. To do good works. To put god first, everyone else next, and me last. And some saints and sinners report that these old ways work. They never worked for me, and I have been seeking god since early teens. I do not know anyone for whom these methods have produced the intensely desired result.
We are talking about a spontaneous experience of the mind blowing love and partnership of and with god, not an intellectual conclusion or an orientation towards a heaven of hope. We are talking about something real, now, terrific, and, as said earlier, casual. It is being found by the ultimate best friend.
I don’t mean to tell you what it is like. Your experience may be different. But I would bet a lot it will be whatever is your heart’s desire; it will be what you have always longed for. I think it will no doubt be the peak experience of your life. It may be what you have given up ever finding – being infinitely loved.
A Process
Let’s look at how we learned to love in the beginning.
I suggest that after we have been taught to deny ourselves, we are then instructed in the importance of loving everybody else.
But if we inquire seriously how we do that, we might someday wonder where the love is that we are supposed to give everyone else. I believe we are told to give “our” love to others. So if it’s our love, it must be inside of us.
So then, when we give it away, doesn’t it happen sort of like this?
Here is a diagram of the normal situation when we love someone.
Notice how the love I give to you skips over me. And the love you give to me skips over you. That is, we don’t let this love we are giving touch us as it directly and purposely flows out of us to another, We don’t let it bless our selves. How can I let it touch me? That is not what it’s for. Once we make the decision to give love to someone, that love is theirs, is it not? And wouldn’t it be stealing?
We love someone else all the time without loving ourselves. In fact this is mostly what we do.
Looking for Love
Let’s take perhaps the best case; we are looking for Love to give it away. Let’s consider parent and child, and if you are not a parent, let’s consider you and the one who knocks your socks off, the one you can’t live without, the one you know is The One.
We want to give our love away. It doesn’t matter why, and there may be a lot of reasons, but we are focusing in this discussion on the giving. One characteristic of love about which we have little doubt when we are truly, madly, deeply in love, is that we have enough to give. Enough to shower on our loved one. Parental love is simply and obviously infinite to the parent. Parents may get tired, irritated, distracted, and we don’t always give love the way we wish to, but do we ever fear that we don’t have enough to give?
Do we even think about it? Do we even in the midst of our intoxication for child, husband, romantic partner, ever ask ourselves if we have enough love to give to them? This is while we are still crazy in love, now, during this glorious feeling that we are so in love, we have so much love for them, that we may fear we are going to explode with love.
Here is the way one five year old put it, and could it be said more beautifully?
Well, don’t we? Don’t we romantically or parentally or in whatever way we love, do we not just overflow with love for them? Does it feel like actually exploding? Do we not sometimes feel we are ‘coming apart’, just losing ourselves in the flow of love pouring out of us that sometimes we pour out too, we may not know who we are, but one thing we know for sure – is we are different when we are loving someone. And we are different in a way we have always wanted to be different.
When we are in the throes of loving, we change identity, and it isn’t scary at all, is it? What if in contrast to losing ourselves in love, one ordinary day when we are not crazy in love with anyone, and maybe we just have a backache or something, we suddenly didn’t know who we were when we were going to the grocery store? We might end up in the emergency room in the most severe panic attack. In the normal course of life, what is more cherished and essential than our identity?
However, when we are in the throes of love, we may not know who we are. But isn’t it a relief? Do we care who we are? If we had to choose then between absorption in our own identity as we usually are, or absorption in our loved one, would there be one second of ponder? It’s inconceivable, isn’t it, that we would say something like: hmmmm, Joe or me? Sally or me? My daughter or me, my son or me? It’s ridiculous isn’t it, it even sounds inhuman to think of thinking so. No. It’s the loved one, that’s it. If not that, we don’t think we’re in love.
We should have established that being in love in the normal way is crazy. Crazy in love.
So we are totally focused on giving the most important thing we can imagine, our love, away as fast and as completely as possible.
Number one, don’t we fear that we will ever run out?
Number two, do we even think about where is the love coming from that we are giving away so beautifully and wonderfully?
No, and No.
Our interest now is in looking at question two, “where is the love” as the once popular song crooned. “Where is the love?” If we do wonder about it for one second, is it not totally obvious to us that it is inside us, it comes from inside us, and that this quite obvious fact is one of the reasons we usually know and don’t ponder that it just makes us feel so incredibly good about giving love away.
We know two things without question.
The source of the love we give to another is inside us.
It is plenty.
There is more than plenty. There are gobs. Gobs and gobs. We never look in the love larder to see if our supply is running out. Out would be rageous. Out would be impossible. Running out of love is one thing that when we are in love, we never fear. On the planet of fear, this is not one of them.
Pretty interesting. On the planet of lack, in the very domain of uncertainty, we do not fear running out of what we are certain is the most important commodity in the world. The abundance of internal, reliable, glorious love is not a subject of normal, rational, worldly, doubt. At least not while we are deeply in love.
A similar interesting and also relatively ignored reality is that the two physical things most needed by us, air and water, are so intimate with us that we don’t realize it. We are surrounded by air, and there is enough. And on this planet, things are arranged so that water FALLS OUT OF THE SKY. It falls out of the sky! Rain and wind being main component of weather, they are the most popular topic.
What would happen if we walked up to a stranger and said, “Looks like it’s going to Love today, doesn’t it.”
An extra thing to do with love
Rain and air are outside of us. But we have agreed now that there is an infinite reservoir of love inside us. Rather adroitly set up, wouldn’t we think? Infinite love inside?
Somehow we have been programmed in life that when you give love to someone it is “theirs”, it actually belongs to them and is fully for them even as it inhabits us. Our love is not allowed to really be love when it is on the way to another. So it’s not really allowed to be itself as it goes to another where it will be allowed to be itself. Love just loves. It loves everything it touches. But not when we have packaged it up to give away.
That is why we don’t ever let our love touch us.
Love is not allowed to love as it transits through our awareness to another. It may never occurs to us to enjoy and benefit from the beauty and solace of this love coursing through our selves. And we certainly don’t easily believe it is for ourselves as well as for somebody else. And as we lovingly give it to someone else we find some way to ignore it within us on its way away.
We might consider the classic state of this in the Mom. Don’t moms, and are they not expected to, deny themselves as they give love to everybody else? Isn’t that how we know a “good mom?” She just gives and gives and never takes anything for herself. Her reward might be to know we think she is good, not allowing herself to think she is good. Would that not detract from her being a good mom? To get distracted by herself makes her less vigilant about our needs? My answer is Yup, that’s what we do and what she buys into.
It’s quite amazing to realize we are convinced love is inside us, and we know it is the most precious thing we can experience in this life. But we don’t experience our own love. The only love we intend to experience is the love we get from somebody else.
Moms and all of us undoubtedly love loving. It feels wonderful to love, to give love, no matter what. But I suggest we do not let the love we love love us.
So we think about our love, but from an inner distance. We don’t dare touch it because maybe we know deeply that you cannot touch love without it transforming you. That it is by nature sticky. That we’ll never get it off us, and we will walk around pasted in our own love and people will say, “That one, they are obsessed with themselves, can’t they love anybody else except themselves?” In fact, don’t we usually think somebody who seems to love themselves a lot is a narcissist, is “full of themselves”? Is something wrong with my being full of me? Am I supposed to be full of not-me? To be so is basically to be schizoid. Even Pink Floyd, “There’s somebody in my head, but it’s not me.” But nevertheless, there is a strong cultural bias against self love. Parenthetically, we should distinguish between narcissistic self love and genuine self love, which is not of ego. Genuine self love allows and includes self knowledge, and when we know who we really are, we know we are not an ego.
Loving someone to get love back from them is what the Course In Miracles calls a “special relationship” The special relationship is in distinct contrast to the only other style of relationship which it calls the “Holy Relationship”. The special relationshiop could also be called the usual relationship, the ordinary relationship, or perhaps even the boring relationship. Boring because don’t we sit and twiddle our thumbs, or more accurately twiddle our hearts, waiting for the payoff of seeing our love hit its target, the loved one as a target, and we are interested in seeing the transformation and gratitude of the loved one for our love. So much gratitude that they can’t help but love us back. And can’t this take a long time? If so, what are we supposed to do in the love domain until we know if they love us back?
It is called ‘unrequited love’, and if you look up requited you find it means “to repay”. So we can see the special relationship is really like a business transaction. It’s a bundle of expectations. We want quality control and a guarantee. If I have squandered all my love on you, I might stop loving you until I see that you are requiting my love, filling up my deficit that I spent on you. Credits and debits. Double entry lovekeeping.
And of course if one of us starts keeping track of the balances in the love account …..
So we have packaged up or put in a pipeline the most indescribably awesome stuff in the universe and made sure we don’t touch it ourselves. To be a good person, I make sure that it doesn’t touch me, in transit to you.
Is it because we do think we don’t have enough inside? So we might use it up if we touch it during its holy mission to the ‘outside’, or diminish its effective arrival, which we want to be overwhelming.
Do we want it to be overwhelming to the recipient so the object of our love is obligated to do the same, and send us overwhelming love too.
Is that is the only way we can have love? If it comes from somebody else?
And isn’t it overwhelming love that we do want to experience? Does anybody want just a little bit?
Yet we deny ourselves even a little bit of the overwhelming love we are sending to the other?
Really, truly, what is up with this? How come I do this?
Rather than spending time in analyzing the why of all this oddness, let me suggest what to do. This love coming out of us is an endless tumbling and alive river of infinite and perfect beauty.
Take a sip.
We better whisper this at first.
Take just a little sip. Nobody will notice. And a little sip won’t take much away from your beloved. See what it’s like. Think of it like quality control if you are using the transaction model of love. You want to make sure this love you are sending is the real thing, and how can you tell if you don’t taste it yourself?
We do this with soup. Why not with love? A teaspoon now and then doesn’t deny our loved ones their lunch, does it?
I can doubly enjoy this love of mine. I can recognize it is infinite, can’t be diminished by me or anyone. I can take a sip of this immense elixir as it goes through me. If it’s “in” me, is it not really mine? If it’s mine, can’t I have some?
And of course I can also enjoy seeing the love being received and accepted, which is the usual case.
I am laughing in rueful recognition as I write this. The normal situation of special relationships rightly seen is completely unexplainable. Let’s review it quickly in summary form as soundbites, and see how we feel about this after we do see it in compressed form.
Love is infinite.
Even a little bit of the infinite is infinite.
I am full of it. 🙂
It is extreme delight to give it away.
It cannot be lessened by anything or anyone.
It is gold plated invincible, perfect, going everywhere it is allowed.
But I am afraid to sample my own.
The point is not to ridicule ourselves, but it seems OK to ridicule the situation. No matter how it became established. Is it not completely hilarious, in a squirmy sort of way?
I’ve already convinced myself my love is inside me because I see it go by on my love train to Sally or Bob.
Love is everything. Even the Beatles said “Love is all there is.” I have love inside of me. Therefore I have everything. But I won’t let me have the everything that I have.
Talk about somebody who deserves love and healing. Somebody in this situation is denying themselves everything in the midst of everything. The love they deserve to heal from this mess better not be contingent, it better not be from outside of them. Instead it better be a guarantee that cannot come and go, because its mission is so important. So what is one to do then, once one knows they own the solution to life? It’s theirs. The love inside us is not really belonging to anyone else, how could it? They have their own infinite supply, and like us, do or don’t know it.
When we take a sip of our own love, it shows us that by definition we are lovable. We are both loveable and love-able. We are able to love and we are ale to be loved because we oh my gosh, loved ourselves a little and there was no reprisal from other belief systems. It proves it because we do it. Wow, if I can love me, anyone can love me. Actually, I was the last hold out. Mom loved me, Dad loved me, but I never did.
The love inside of us is able to liberate us from fear of experiencing itself. But how do we get it started? It’s a catch 22, is it not? If we won’t let ourselves experience the love inside of us that can let us experience the love inside of us, what is it possible to do? How do we get started?
How can we allow our love to allow our love?
Well,
why not take a little sip
and see what happens
It’s ok
It gives us a trailer of a complete reorganization of the universe…
Is the following what we can all look forward to?
*
A personal experience:
Something nice has been happening for the last several days. Some Gurus have described as “The Witness”, a non-involved consciousness that is close to you and always available and merely observes but also gives off a beautiful harmonious feeling.. Well, the Witness has started Moving In, meaning overlapping with my normal everyday waking consciousness. Lots of benefits occur in addition to just a nice feeling.
I had a classic day from hell yesterday with everybody needing me at once all day long, my 16 year old son, and people where I do volunteer work, it was truly a massive challenge and I don’t multi-task well. All day long I was on the phone fixing things, figuring things out, for my boy. He had forgotten an assignment, his track spikes, and felt he couldn’t go to a meet, but wanted his spikes and his tablet brought to school an hour away from me, to work on the assignment. There were emails from coaches, and text messages, text messages, and text messages. Usually very early in such a dramatic 3D squeeze I would break and start to yell at people. Wince.
It didn’t happen. But I was not trying to keep calm. Clear light was dawning in the actual midst of the true frenzy all by itself, and I began to notice that the Witness was “moving in” to “me” and suddenly I was also non-involved in all the dramas. Imagine a Venn diagram with one circle Bill’s old cranky consciousness, and the other circle pure Witness without judgment, with no ax to grind, and just attention. The overlap started and expanded to maybe a quarter of my normal consciousness and even that much was enough to transform everything, mood, decision making, everything of 3D. I became non-involved in my own brain. Just there, noticing, watching the Bill Brain sorting everything out and text in the car, and just do everything that had to be done, — and not get angry.
I think actually many folks have this experience, it is just that this one was extremely vivid and also continuous, in fact it is here today, about 4 days into it. The Witness coming to me instead of my going to the Witness is new and quite a revelation.
It feels like a return to normality and sanity.
At about 5 days, the Witness left. I am left too, left with a beautiful memory of how life can be. The situation right now is that I can bring in the Witness by request, but it has not actively sought me out since. During the experience, when I woke up in the morning, it was there. When I was eating, it was there. I didn’t have to look. The Witness graciously and sweetly, stayed available, being.”
Who we experience as us has always been mysterious. The closer we have looked at how we know we exist, the more confusing it has become. It has so stumped most of humanity that several geniuses figured it out precisely backwards. Writing back in an even denser age than ours, the philosopher Renee Descartes concluded, “I think, therefore I am.” Writing in a later and softer age, the Indian sage Krishnamurti made what I think is a more helpful observation, “Thinking is an addiction.”
Indeed Hindu cosmology has for me always offered a more sensible order, first comes Being, then thinking and all the phenomenal rest.
Finding The Witness makes this a clear and immutable finding. The Witness doesn’t think. It just is.
At possibly the opposite end of the spectrum of who we think we are can be had some often terrifying experiences labeled as schizophrenic. Really helpful work was done by R.D. Laing in this area, intersecting identity and illness. In The Divided Self, 1967?, Laing posited a useful description of identity confusion he called “False Self Systems”. Many of us choose to appear to be one sort of person in one environment, and to be a different personality in a different environment. It can be found easier to be chameleons than to be authentic.
Experienced to extremes, one has no idea who he is. Laing said we can create false selves, often for protection, among which we can become simply lost. Laing asserted everybody seeks “ontological security”, not only knowledge and experience of who we are, but certainty that we exist at all.
If we go with Descartes, and put our trust in thinking, we can quite easily wind up in a serious debate with ourselves that implicates our actual identity. Anything can be thought. Opposites can be simultaneously thought, even believed, and we can think ourselves nearly out of existence. It has been asserted that the ability to simultaneously hold contradictory thoughts is a mark of high intelligence.
In college I was convinced, and supremely agitated to think, that if god is infinite he must by definition will the happening of all possible things, including his own non-being. This was for an already nervous undergraduate, really scary. I didn’t come to this from the “God is dead” league current at the time. The conclusion actually seemed to me built into the structure of thought and logic. He had to. And if God didn’t exist, neither did I. The whole thing collapsed, and me too.
Furthermore, I went to college believing that I would meet wise men who knew what life really is and could explain it. By reading in an untrained way I had become confused. I knew that my first university philosophy class would seat my intellectual chaos into divine right order.
But early in freshman year, I learned with growing intellectual and spiritual horror, that nobody there knew anything important. They were just as adrift as I was, emotionally and spiritually. One brilliant philosophy professor encouraged me that perhaps he knew. He used the phrase in one seminar like,
“… at three o’clock in the morning when you know that you are the center of the universe …”
I thought yes, yes, yes!, am I really, tell us all about it, tell us what that means. Then I found that he was ridiculing us and himself for having such a bizarre delusion. The best I got was from people who knew they didn’t know, but I already knew that about both of us by that time. University for me was two million minutes of wasted time and lonely philosophical melancholy.
The Witness evaporates all this nonsense in one event. The first time it shows up for lunch, the whole table is first cleared of everything. Then Absolute Being is served. And we never try to think reality into existence, or out of existence, again.
The panoply of I Am
The structure of everything might be something like this:
me, ego,
I, Higher Self,
Witness,
Soul,
Atman,
Witness behind the Witness,
Brahma, classic, big league, omnipotent God.
Nice to diagram, but I am not sure the structure and names matter much.
There is no question when the Witness comes around about if I am, or who I am. Laing’s “Ontological Security” doesn’t get on the menu. We learn the Witness is not somebody else. At first it may feel so, as if you are being watched, but quite soon it is realized we are watching us, then I am watching me, then I am watching me watching me, and then there is just watching.
How do I find the Witness?
Witnessing can start very early in meditation. Then it can suddenly overlap into activity. It often dawns in meditators first in their activity during simple repetitive actions where the mind is not engaged, for example sanding a board and being hit over the head by my own being, was an early experience of mine. It gets trickier when you’re doing something where the mind is engaged, that is, it is essentially in the way, because as stated the Witness is a thinkless reality. Later we may find that this experience of witnessing can coexist with quite furious cognition, driving, talking on the phone. But the witness survives it all. Keeps a calm inner “I Am” base note in the midst of outer cacophonous activity.
The Witness behind the Witness
The best descriptions I know for the experience of witnessing are on Mooji.org. In one discourse Mooji surprises us by talking about he Witness behind the Witness.
Finding and being found by the witness is to be inhabited by and an exemplar of what Maharishi called “self-referral consciousness”, which is sufficient in itself, eternally uncontingent, it is to experience complete ontological confidence. The certainty in personal self existence is total. The wan undergraduate thinking that he may have to not exist should have started meditating much earlier than he did. But nobody on the faculty of the great university he attended even knew of it to suggest it.
Once we experience ourselves as uncontingent, we are free. Alan Watts, one of the West’s early exponents of meditation put it this way,
“To understand the whole process of oneself requires constant alertness, awareness, in the action of relationship. There must be a constant watching of every incident, without choice, without condemnation or acceptance, with a certain sense of dispassion, so that the truth of every incident is revealed.”
Self-referral consciousness, being everything, it needs nothing.
How can the individual partake of such an abstract, universal, elusive thing?
Once when I came out of an especially quiet meditation I found myself staring at my left hand. My hand appeared to me as a landscape of clear being. It glowed with a marvelous happiness and ecstatic beauty. It seemed an extension of the meditation, an answering of all questions although I had not asked any.
Soon for an unknown reason I had formed a circle of thumb and forefinger on one hand and superimposed it over the other.
The result seemed especially profound to me. It was just dazzling in ways I couldn’t follow. I was mesmerized and kept the positions for quite a while. Eventually it wore off, but it has remained unforgettable.
In context of some current notions I think I know what it was teaching.
This will get very abstract. It is abstract, but at least it is always ready to hand.
Hands and fingers are of course covered with skin. The skin on my hands had become identified with or representative of what one contacts in meditation, pure unbounded absolute undifferentiated being. Please don’t leave yet.
I first looked at the open left hand. It felt like a landscape of being, as if it were infinite. That was fine, I was used to that. Next the touching fingers of the other hand were put over this skin which represented infinity. The fingers seemed to isolate a section of hand. But the fingers were also skin. While the experience was a totally harmonious and uncontroversial matter, some of me was aware that infinity had somehow just bounded infinity. But how could it do that? This question was at least presented. In my state at the time, the answer was “of course” and everything was completely OK; it was just something at the time to notice, but it is worth emphasizing it was all so beautiful and seemed so significant that it was clear as glass that something important was occurring, something worth getting was being said. It was like Maxwell’s silver foam rubber hammer.
Now I see it as a primer on boundaries. Chapter 2 of Finding the Supreme in this blog is a long discussion of the technical irony inherent in limits and boundaries. I realize now that the experience of staring at my hands fits right in.
I was observing that all of my skin was the same. I was also observing that part of my skin was marking out or highlighting another part of my skin. But how can something demarcate itself? In the ontological terms of deep meditation, being was marking off or identifying an area of being as separately knowable as a part of its otherwise undifferentiated landscape of self. Of pure skin self in this tutorial case. An unbounded reality of skinness had acquired a perceptually (only perceptually) area of itself as partial. Remember, the hand ‘felt’ infinite. So the fingers of skin acquired the same definition because skin was presenting itself as infinite. Here was the infinite marking out the infinite.
For this discussion and the analogy to be built, we have to imagine that skin is skin, that is, it all looks the same, is the same, is completely homogeneous, there are no different areas in skin, no different colors, no attributes at all except skin. For now, there aren’t fingers and hands. And that was the way it all appeared to me in that event.
The encircled area on my left hand gained a description of itself as different from the rest of the hand, although it absolutely was not different. Let’s say it just somehow became experienceable as bounded by another area of undifferentiated skin itself not identified as thumb and index finger but just as the same substance which it was somehow redefining.
Nothing had actually changed. Skin self had decided to enwrap skin self. But the perception changed.
The simple perception I had while still drenched in the immense conceptual latitude of deep meditation was casually, “Oh. That’s the infinite encircled by some same infinite and telling me whats bounded is separated from the rest. No problem. Something pure can somehow do that.”
That was very interesting and at the time not paradoxical. I can now comment to myself on this unbounded bounded area on my left hand as shall we say unique. If I moved my thumb and fingers a smallest amount, they showed a different part but could not be a boundary of it.
The original entity so defined could get a name. It could be ‘Area Of Skin 1’. When the fingers moved the next area enclosed could be called ‘Area Of Skin 2’. Each would be so many inches across, and so many square inches in size and so on. And the definitions of the two described areas would be different. But each would still be ‘Hand’. More important, each would still be more fundamentally ‘Skin’. And another area of identical skin had called it out as differently defined.
And if skin were all there was then skin had moved within its undifferentiated actuality to identify areas of itself as unique which were really not. This is what was important and is what was showing itself to me in the simple positions of two hands.
And because I was lucky enough to be there observing, I saw something change which did not change. It was a changeless alteration of identifications which were true perceptions but not real changes to the correct definitions of the underling substance(s) of the single thing involved in appearing as two things.
Skin had moved to create seeming difference of skin.
As seer I could enjoy both. Skin was still radiating beauty of its genuine nature and at the same time its newly defined areas of called out uniqueness were most beautiful. The new skin identities were absolutely interesting not least because the hand landscape and the fingers marking out seeming but not actual boundaries were both glowing. Newness worth knowing about had appeared within sameness.
Boundaries came into existence which were not capable of bounding anything because they were composed of the exactly same thing they appeared to bound. It was ‘absolutely’ fascinating.
Now we go off the cliff.
What am I? I am consciousness. Whatever consciousness is, it is a pure undifferentiated field of whatever it is, that’s pretty uncontroversial. So how do I show up as conscious within consciousness? As a separate identity within total sameness which has no separations?
I’m a wrinkle of consciousness in infinite consciousness. I’m an area of area. I’m a pucker of something within the something, an emergent definition with no differences from the rest. I am a candle in the sun.
What does finding the witness in this way, or in any way, have to do with finding the Supreme value of life, the personality of god?
Somehow there are relationships between myself, the Witness, and god which are something like this:
There is a relationship of infinity between me and the witness, and a relationship of love between me and god. And there is a relationship of unity between god and the witness. These relationships produce an overall relationship of identity among the three areas of universal Self.
I know this is a lot of abstraction to handle, but in the experiences of meeting the Witness and “setting face to face” as the Buddhists say, there is no abstraction. Moreover, there are qualities of appreciation in each beingness of god, Witness, and me. The Witness is impersonal, while there are simultaneously personal and impersonal aspects in god. And I seem somewhere in the middle. I seem to share in the universal absolute of god and the witnessing aspect in my self, while also perceiving and inheriting the personality venue of god. It seems to be the blessing of humanness to have this extraordinary awareness all at once.
So when you find the Witness, you can navigate to god, and when god finds you, it opens the path to the Witness, and when I find me, I am known as a united identity with both.
Mooji quotes an unnamed saint, who put it all much better, and simpler, which is always better …
“When you seek for god, you find yourself, and when you seek yourself, you find god.”
And the Witness sees it all happening, and sees that it is good.
*
In the 1960’s younger people all over the world adopted a word that comes from Eastern esoteric and meditative disciplines to describe the world. The word is “vibration”. Shortened to “vibes” this term began to be used to describe a person’s energy, the national news, one’s family, politics, and nearly anything else both organic and non. Everything experiencable could have a vibe. It meant a perceivable adjunct to the merely visible reality of the thing. It was meant to describe a sometimes subtle feeling about the object or person, usually felt as an affinity to the observer or as a lack of it. The ability to sense vibrations about things was thought to be a matter of personal sensitivity to energetic invisible realities that give rise to material visible things.
In chapter 3 of this book there is a discussion of ‘frequency’ and how frequency seems to manifest in the world. Both words are used here to describe the same matter, and the same not-matter.
Life expresses itself in frequencies. Quantum physics “explains” that frequencies are ‘nothing’ vibrating. Getting this point is most difficult from the earthly perspective. How can nothing vibrate? How can nothing do anything? Perhaps the quantum mechanics (sic) will help us with this soon and explain from the physics perspective how nothing can vibrate. But this is the best statement in the popular science press for now that we have to name the emergence of things from their source in immateriality.
As mentioned earlier here, the entire experience of living and knowing changes based on how we ‘are’. And it was asserted that how we are is a function of the quickness of our frequency. How fast or how slowly we are vibrating. Hate was even described as “slow love”. And it is given to humans to be able to alter our frequencies. Many techniques exist, though some are not described in terms of altering our frequency, they sometimes have spiritual descriptors, sometimes those of meditating, increasing health, etc.
Initially we have no idea we are responsible for our rate of vibration being somewhere on the continuum of frequencies, somewhere on the probably trillions of locations in a spectrum of vibrational speed. We just don’t know. From the perspective of a third dimensional reality, this has no validity, and it is even hard to think about.
Faster frequencies generate a more ‘expanded’ current reality. In this context expanded means both bigger and also more intricate and complex, more full, more obvious and also, ironically and benevolently, more simple. This is the paradox we inherit by personal vibrational rate, that ascending in frequency, which is to say raising our expressed vibrational pattern, makes experience wonderfully more complex and wonderfully more simple. We could realize the more complex value by seeing that the options available for us to have increased. Options may complicate, but not choosing an option is an option, and presents us with the vast simplicity of it. Becoming a Witness of ourselves and our life as shown earlier here releases all the multiplicities and entanglements of being in the world, and things still get done. We straddle doing and appreciating, easily, without trying. There is a sensation of paddling downstream, enjoying the view of the riverbanks. We just steer. Not struggle. As Fritz Perls said, we “Don’t push the river.”
Given that vibration is central to life, it’s worth looking as deeply as we can into how vibration comes about in the first place. We engage this strange issue of how can nothing vibrate.
Toth and the Revisioning of Darkness
Automatic writing is an old technique to connect with guidance and write it down in real time. It is said that sometimes the guides take over one’s hands and literally do the typing or handwriting. For me, communications are auditory, and I type or hand write them.
Below, my statements are introduced by ‘>’.
>Surround with light, standard protections.
>This is to connect with guidance for automatic writing.
Yes, we are here.
>I want to ask about my mission on earth.
Yes?
>What is it?
Ancient. Egyptian. Atlantean to Egyptian. You went from Atlantis to Egypt as Thoth, with Thoth energies. It is of Thoth.
Put yourself under Thoth energies again. His tutelage. You once knew. See what is there for you.
>I want to know how I will know what is there for me and what I am supposed to do with it.
It goes in stages, first connect, then ask what is relevant, then ask what to do, but you will know that automatically at the time given.
>Is there else for me to know now?
No.
>End of writing
After this I sat to meditate. As soon as I closed my eyes, a large black bird with a long beak came to me and said, “Welcome son”. He looked like a toucan.
He turned me into a smaller version of him. He flew to a pyramid in Egypt and I flew with him. We flew down into the bottom of the pyramid to a completely dark chamber and sat facing each other. He began pecking with his beak on the top of my head. He cut through my skull and removed my brain, leaving my head completely empty. He replaced the top of my head and I was given to know that the inside of my head was completely dark in the same way as the chamber in which we were, and they were similar in darkness. As in resonance. I was to sit there and pay attention and learn, and he flew away.
Looking up Thoth later in Wikipedia, I found this, which sure explains the beak.
After I thought about this for a while, the following ideas began to come.
EMPTINESS
One of the things a consciousness is, is a space maker. The first thing thought creates is emptiness.
A consciousness first makes space, or emptiness, for a thought to be in. So creating emptiness is a consciousness’ first act just after it become self-aware. Maharishi Yogi said “When existence becomes aware of itself, then intelligence becomes intelligent.” So consciouisness makes space for creating by addressing being and creating from it emptiness first. It’s the smart way to do things. If a thing, even a thought, is to be, it needs a place in which to become.
So thought first invokes room to create. It invokes Being to create a space within which everything else that is ‘thought’ subsequently will be manifested. “Let there be light” – although that actually jumps ahead of the story. It then creates form, and then creates instances of entities, that is, specific organized unique things. And every one IS unique because every thought is unique – even if it looks like a copy. As Michio Kushi, promoter of the Macrobiotic diet, said, “There is nothing identical.”
And his statement is fantastic, truly fantastic, a brilliant insight for a foodie. Calming and perfect, Especially when you say it twice. A really important insight. Why? Because once it is understood, you simply cannot get bored creating as every single thing you think, feel, do, is unique in the Universe.
Therefore, thought is much more powerful than we had first … thought. It actually pulls the potential of generation out of Being into Emptiness. As known from Gurus and physicists, Emptiness is full of infinite potential.
At first, emptiness looks like dark. But we are confused about the attributes of dark; dark actually has nothing to do with bad, evil, meanness, and the like. The defining state of darkness is emptiness, and emptiness is a precursor for everything else.
Darkness comes before light. It says somewhere “and darkness moved on the face of the deep”. Note that darkness (emptiness) happened first, before light got made. Plus, we somehow had “deep” before anything was created which rather doesn’t make sense. As an engineering document Genesis might be a little weak, but nobody can ever fault its poetry.
Anyway, this creation business has all been mentioned before, proving I suppose that there is nothing new under the dark. See Genesis.
The strong point Genesis makes I think is that darkness is not simply an absence of light. In Genesis we didn’t first get light and secondly get shadow. It was the other way around. Thoth seems to have a clarification, that dark is its own self existent state, and that it isn’t negative. When emptiness is created, negative and positive had not yet been made.
Dark is emptiness in its essential nature. Emptiness is absolutely neutral. It is not evil, bad, mean, good, or anything else.
You don’t have to try to create emptiness by for example sitting in Zen meditation ‘No Mind’ for twenty years, because as soon as you think, as soon as you are not in No Mind, you first create an empty place to hold the thought; the thought then creates what you are thinking within the emptiness you just fabricated. And then that emptiness is not empty.
Emptiness pulls creation out of being.
Emptiness is the very fabric of the manifest universe. It is pure anterior. It must be the first step in happening.
Connect to whatever is there.
Ask what is relevant.
Ask what to do.
The connection was to emptiness. Not much choice, since my brain had been removed and my head was officially real, real empty. I asked what was the relevance of it and after a short silence – emptiness – was told “the relevance is in being comfortable in the dark.”
So that is why the experience I was given was to sit in the infinitely dark chamber in the base of the pyramid and just stay there and learn. No other instruction was given.
Unless I found comfort there I would have had to leave. So I now attempt often to sit in the dark chamber underneath the pyramid and be OK. Which means of course not being afraid of what else might be there, realizing that by definition nothing is there.
Often, here it comes, the fear. Hold on to emptiness. Emphasize the emptiness and not the darkness. Emptiness isn’t frightening, it is blindness that is frightening. So stay with emptiness. I am certain this is the correct procedure. Be in the emptiness.
It works and the fear goes away.
The next day I was happy beyond all common sense.
This perhaps “Thothean” way of sitting is simply being in the dark and favoring emptiness over darkness. Favoring the experience of dark as empty, not as unlit. Realizing empty as safe by definition.
Nevertheless, emptiness is the greatest possible ambiguity. As soon as you think, OMG it’s dark, then the demons come to you. Like they did to Buddha on the cusp of his enlightenment. They come because you have defined dark as non-empty and since you cannot see what is there, the old classic human negativity invents devils.
All that can go. Don’t let it even start and when it does don’t push it away, just think, this chamber is empty. Empty. It’s empty. It’s empty because it started empty and I have not created fear yet.
Below is is a diagram of how everything works. The important thing about this set of events is that the apparent pure darkness of the space made by thought for manifesting intent into form is really just emptiness. A safe womb to fill.
Nothing exists in manifest reality until we think it into showing up.
Apparently, the framework into which we manifest things into shareable 3D appearances, that is to say the visible world, is a group creation by the interacting continuous thoughts of all humanity.
The 100thmonkey phenomenon tells us that when enough of a species begins to think differently, the entire composite shared reality for all in the species begins to change. There are different estimates of ‘enough’. Maharishi Yogi said it’s the square root of 1% of all humanity. Others have different numbers.
This mass rethinking is how we are going to get out of the terrifying illusion we are all in together. How we are going to uncreate fear. One of us can isolate ourselves into a thought bubble and be more or less OK, but for all of us and the reality we experience together to alter from terrifying to beautiful, enough people must start thinking love.
And that will be it. In future we will wonder how we could have made such a state as we are in now.
The hard part is predicting when this will occur in our shared slower frequency reality, which will actually increase in frequency as more of us check into it with expanded thinking.
So far, all predictions for when we will recreate heaven have been wrong, but fortunately so also the disastrous ones – think Nostradamus. With 7 billion moods going up and down, nobody can seem to know when enough of us align long enough to rend the misery. The only thing each one of us alone can actually change is when to be the last mentality, the last beating, adoring heart, adding itself to the aggregated thoughts of our companions. That is the huge contribution one can make, to be the last straw of love. It ought to be easy. We can take heart!
Every single thought in the universe starts with an empty slate.
A channeled work I had read long ago contains a passage attributed to Ezekiel, though not in a biblical citation.
“In the beginning was consciousness. Thought preceded the word. Consciousness, or thought, is the omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent mind of God. Thought is the cause and form is the effect. All that is began first as thought, which is the highest vibration. Thought vibrations are lowered into light, lowered again into energy and lowered once more to create mass. Consciousness and energy are the nature of reality.” –
— Becoming Gods
James Gilliand
Matter and Dark Matter
In 2011 a video documentary was released titled “Everything and Nothing”. Written by Physicist Professor Al-Khalili it is about our topic here – from where do things come, and how do they do it?
The presentation suggests that from the quantum vacuum there is a way that somehow entities that are simultaneously waves and particles ‘ jump’ out of this level in pairs. One of the entities is the smallest known bit of matter. The other is the smallest known bit of anti-matter. This phenomenon was predicted by physicist Paul Dirac by an epic piece of mathematics, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1933.
Later, experimental support for this is also found in. And recently an article in the science journal “Nature” 541, 376–379 19 January 2017, suggests the abstract of which states the “empty” vacuum is full of electromagnetic wave forms just aching to manifest, and is therefore not truly empty. The somnolent wave forms may be stimulated to create what we see as matter by shining very short bursts of laser light into it. This is about as far as we can take the science from popular exposes, but it does posit some notions that seem parallel with Toth’s guidance.
Graphic similar to one in Everything and Nothing
Per this documentary these pairs of items pop out simultaneously two by two. It seems unlikely a more vivid demonstration can be given that we live in a universe of duality than this statement of what happens at the very start of manifesting.
It is found that there is a background state of electromagnetic “noise” in the vacuum state. What fluctuates in this reality is the level of the background noise. In other words the state previously thought of a nothing is full of electromagnetic radiations, fluctuations of which result in generating photons, which are the very first step in manifesting what we can see with our eyes.
Emptiness seems to be a state of readiness. It’s ready to fluctuate. Research in physics is never final, but we might make a provisional conclusion in accordance with our discussion of consciousness and creation. Quantum events don’t pull quanta out of nothingness. They are pulled out of emptiness. Emptiness is readiness, even eagerness, pure abstract intent. There isn’t nothing in the universe anywhere. What we have described as Tothian emptiness is actually a safe space from which things pop into an existence we can see. Please see next for some ancient guidance on this statement of seeming quantum “readiness”.
Vedic Guidance
We have looked at Genesis from the Judeo Christian tradition for perspective on seminal events in physical creation. The Rik Veda is another religious text said to be one of the oldest in the world and exists within Hindu traditions. There we actually find comic uncertainty. The core text on creation is said to be in Mandala 10, hymn CXXIX. Creation and its last stanza says
“Whence this creation came,
Whether he made it or not,
The overseer of it in the highest heaven,
Only he knows it. Or doesn’t he know?”
Hardly the certainty for which we seek. But there is one important clue as to what goes on. Vedic creation thought asserts a similar structure to the one suggested by current science, but 6,000 years before modern physics. The Vedas say there is a layer of unmanifest potential (that we are calling emptiness), and above it a “layer” of vibration. The key line has been translated “Below was urge, above was will.”
Urge. A desire. Somehow the Absolute unmanifest being of the universe pushes through its own nature a seed of wanting to manifest visible creation. Somehow emptiness can move within itself. We might extend this to say once this pool of emptiness has mysteriously moved within itself, we have a wave, and once we have a wave, we have oscillation, or frequency, and time begins to exist to mark the frequency of waves.
The Judeo-Christian text put this another way and so beautifully: “And darkness moved on the face of the deep.” Darkness is what we describe here as emptiness. The face of the deep is the layer of emptiness bursting to become, and the deep on which it rests is the primal, eternal, changeless Absolute.
We are told by ancient Hindu texts that Frequency manifests first as a thought of the creator. The seminal creation of God is Idea. By thought, the creation we eventually see has started. We perceive vibrations in the field of being as the universe. Say the physicists. Say the Vedas. Says Thoth. So we are frequencies in being. All the manifest creation is frequency in now manifested being. We and frequency are ideas. An idea is real to another idea. Ideas are alive to each other.
This notion of ideas participating with each other is an attempt to comprehend how matter, which we now, under the ‘urge’ of physics say is not “real” is perceived as “real” by agents within itself, that is, us. In other words, we too are ideas (consciousness) within the mind (consciousness) of god.
Otherwise it’s a full stop in comprehending the universe in terms of common sense. Seers and new age theorists and modern physicists unite in telling us that the world is not real. That it is vibration in something that is nothing. The penultimate term used is that the world is illusion. In Hinduism the term “maya” is used to denote a fog or illusory trick played by God on man to mask the true being and nature of himself behind a veil through which we must penetrate by our own wisdom and supreme efforts to win our way to mercy and relation with God. Absent this, we remain lost, both Christian and Eastern traditions seem to agree.
This theory is a disaster for humanity. It imposes a mountain between us and god, a mountain of illusion, with supposed reality at the top of a bloody and mostly impossible climb. This theoretical position that we are masked from ultimate love by illusions we mostly find impenetrable, is another way of saying that ultimate love hides itself from us.
But why would ultimate love do this? It simply does not make common sense that the primary unitive force in the universe we experience would withhold itself from itself until the denied portion of infinity somehow hitches up its spiritual pants and forces its way back to itself. Forces itself by meditating in caves for lifetimes, forces itself by scourging its body with pain, forces itself to the divine by forcing itself to suffer. What?
Basically this plan says love hates.
Common simple thinking rejects this plan as literally crazy.
The common sense experience is that illusions hurt. But this finding itself is rejected by new spiritual thinking. It’s just illusion so don’t take it seriously that you are in agony of doubt and loss at the edge of a pool of glorious love that has rejected you. All pain is illusion. Get over it. God loves us but requires us to prove through suffering that almost kills us that we love him too. These odd ideas place ultimate absurdity at the core of ultimate reality, but fortunately these ideas aren’t so.
It goes further. The concomitant realization based on the premises above that frequencies are vibrations of nothing also implies that we are illusions. That we aren’t real. We aren’t real to each other and we are not real to God. Since the seminal vibrations bursting forth from emptiness REMAIN VIBRATIONS as they expand and generate the physical universe, everything we see doesn’t exist. One hopes that eventually physics will explain how non physical frequencies can come together to form experiences like tables, apples, cars, human bodies, but for now it seems like we need to give in and conclude that everything we see is a vibration from thought.
A key to the puzzle might be to understand that an idea is real to another idea. Have it the Hindu way if we wish, creation is just an unreal idea which masks itself from itself for as Hinduism calls “Lila”, or “play”. Wow what a game. Or as the Christians put it, because of evil force also created by god called a devil. And that spiritual life is an ultimate battle consisting of denying ourselves, and killing our actual experience of ourselves and of manifest life by positing that the only thing real is god and that he created an almost impenetrable wall of evil to keep us from him unless we go to war with ourselves and go to war with evil and win.
Most do not succeed in this warfare. The criteria of success given are mutable, for one thing. So you do all the required things and practically kill yourself with austerities and you become a Saint. Chapter and verse of spiritual progress in one tradition says that the better you become the worse it is. The closer you get to god the harder he makes the task! Saints have actually reported that as they shed human desires for enjoyment of everything that god makes for us, their increasingly tiny remaining sins loom larger before them and loom larger for god, and the insulation between the seeker and the sought becomes denser and denser and so you tell everybody that from your supposed exalted position that this is a lot harder than you ever imagined, and you are more evil than you can know until you nearly vanquish evil. When it’s put this way, when these assumptions are unraveled into the domain of actual normal continual human experience, all one can say is Oh My God.
So, the way out is the way in. Inquiring into and experiencing our inner nature quite pivots the above understandings and demanifests them quite quickly and very easily. You do not have to try to know who you really are. Basically all you have to do is close your eyes. And thank god so doing discloses early on in an inner journey that illusion is a false thought. Nothing real is masked from us. Nothing ultimate is withheld from us by an external and kingly creator. Nothing is what is not real. Inner life is a celebration of being and a door to love, love of self and of creator, which are known then as the same. As stated several times one does not go anywhere. The journey within is not a journey. It’s just an “Oh”! Oh, I see. Let’s just see what seeing sees, and it sees everything we want, everything that matters, everything that is, and everything that loves. Which is everything. This sure is worth a go, or shall we say, a stay.
Now it can be seen that a reason for loading you down with an abstruse and abstract diagram of how creation happens is to get us to the statement that an idea is real to another idea. That vibration is real to vibration. Aside from the fact that it is rather soothing to put together a flowchart of everything, it’s a step to no steps.
WHY DO WE CARE IN A BOOK ON FINDING GOD ABOUT THE PROCESS OF CREATION IN EXTREME DETAIL? Because it shows that in this universe boundaries are optional, since boundaries are frequencies in a field of consciousness and so are we. Separateness simply cannot be actual.
Why then would we say would god creates the unreal? Why would anybody create the unreal? Why would an artist or a home builder create the unreal? Would we want to say, “you know god, you did a really good job on creation, and it is beautiful. I sure wish it were real.”
I have seen and heard humans take this dogmatically both ways. A philosopher in a classroom to make a point said, “You want to know what’s real?” He knocked his knuckles on the table and said, “This is what’s real.” Physicists and certainly others now argue the reverse. They will knock on a table and say, “We know now that this table is not real. It is all empty space. It just seems real to us but it is really just fluctuations in a quantum field.” Just vibrations of something that we don’t understand what it is, but we know it is not something and so the apparent something that it gives rise to isn’t something.
But a meditator can say, hmmm, you know what? I am really really real. I never knew I was real before. But now I experience directly who I really am. I hid my reality from myself but had to posit something real about me to everyone else, so I fabricated other unreal persons to show them. I made up a version of who I thought it was ok to be and waved it in front of others to get a verification that it was real, and that helped. It was ok to be good so I presented myself as good. I presented myself as so good that I denied my own needs and sacrificed my life to my family. Unfortunately by the end of my life that turned out to be not so good, because they all left me and my version of me became empty, and I had no other. While I didn’t know anything real about me I knew that I hurt. A lot. Or I thought it was good to be smart so I presented a personality who was smart. And so on.
This is what made us spies in our own lives, as was suggested before. From inside a portal of denial we spied out of our eyes at the image we presented to the world to see how well it worked. And if it did work, we tried to do more of it. If it didn’t we might choose to rebel strongly against those who acted as if this presentation was unreal, and ramify this presentation and elaborate it and push it on others and away from me so hard that I become described as insane. Dr. Laing describes this situation extremely well as mentioned earlier as false self systems within which the lost become more lost.
We bring this up again now in the context of simply orienting ourselves around this dilemma, by doing nothing. By closing our eyes and non-resisting what we see. A Course in Miracles calls this to remain “undefended against our good”. Undefending isn’t an activity. It isn’t a step. There are no steps to god. It is just an involuntary “Oh!” by me, echoed around the universe by all that is. And when we do this, when we let our attention go into free fall within ourselves, once we know how to look around there, we “see that it is good”. Automatically good, and that we didn’t make it good, it was always good, we just never looked. Various traditions call this becoming “realized”. Realization dawns by itself after we take appropriate unactions, it is not a doing. OK, closing our eyes is a step, a small doing. But let’s look at it as not holding them open. Letting them rest. After a long, long time of their staring aghast at a version of reality that we have posited is as real as anything else, but which once inside we know, cannot possibly be God’s.
A dear teacher of meditation put it this way to me. “God wouldn’t do that to me! He loves me too much!” Thank you, John.
*
I get the impression that god seems casual in his conversations with me because he is me.
When I talk to myself inside, I don’t try to sound like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain with bursts of fire and smoke. Isn’t our inner dialog relatively offhand? It’s certainly impromptu, do we make appointments? “Bill, at 10 tomorrow morning I and me are going to have a meeting. I am going to get to the bottom of what you did yesterday to Norma. Do you realize how mean that was?” Doubtful. Maybe for fun. We might yell at ourselves, but not deliberately or like an other. We are intimate with ourselves, when in our right minds. When we rage at and insult ourselves, it’s not truly us, it is our egos.
God, being always in his right mind, is truly intimate with us. Gentle and loving eternally.
Here is another example of a meeting wrapped in his casual gentleness and intimacy.
“This morning as I was driving to work I passed a certain roadside canal as I always do when going that way, and given recent rains, it was very full. The water was slate brown, dimpling with a simple October rain, and I suddenly became aware of this alongside channel in a different, much more intimate way. I heard inside, “I am deep”, and it was unmistakably god. I felt a languid unrolling of benignity of the long canal bottom that spread immediately to all rivers, all oceans, all water, on earth. The waterness of god was vivid, a sense of supine female ease, delighted availability and intimacy with me; I was being invited to be involved with this feeling, this perception, of expansive liquid loveliness. A sense of godly glee underneath it all was streaming deeply in the canal, in the rivers, in the integration of world water. My delight was great, I witnessed, and was yet involved in being what was witnessed. The runner of all the universes was not busy. He was all present, undistracted, fully with. This was all for me. He did not want to be anywhere else, and neither of course did, could, I.
I did not think until now how god was also taking care of things every elsewhere, the thought then never dawned, god was all mine, for me, with me, glad for me to be, and I didn’t feel unworthy, I didn’t think, er, Sir, are you sure you have time for this? This part of it all was included, and inclusive, and it made it in an easy way, timeless.
Like everything I have experienced of this universal deity, this source of all, this infinite executive, nothing was a big deal. Except, perhaps, for him at that time, the I of me. I could not think very much, I could just be there. And happily, part of me was driving the car quite well.
As my attention returned to the road, the goingness of roadway echoed in some easy way the goingness of canal, they ran parallel in a sameness, and I was paddling downstream as it were.
In front of the car, a wet maple leaf caught the wind and tumbled the way I was going, and up jumped the experience of god as tumblingness, of the leaf as expression of the tumbling ability of what is, what can, what can choose to tumble in the wind, and the leaf was aware in general, and aware of me, and aware of its little show, and loving the tumble. For a minute second, all there was was tumblingness of leaf, teeny glee, this yellow brown leaf soaked in canal, was showing off. (Also, wet leaves don’t usually tumble in the wind, just try and rake them.)
But this one did. The grand father of all had stepped back, was watching me drive, watching his leaf, enjoying very much my enjoying. It was as if there really could not have been a more interesting, actually nicer, pirouetting, athletic leaf than this precise one and there was so much time to enjoy it with god. God was audience, god was companion, his gladness we shared this moment was normal, the usual thing, like he spends all his time witnessing us noticing.
He pays great attention to you. It is a great thing for him when you, yes, you, he is telling me to tell you personally so, notice his great enjoyment in leaf tumbling, acorn falling, water waving, eye blinking, love making, bulldozer driving, parliamentary boasting, there really isn’t anything not included. And our noticing so is one of his great thrills. Whew.
On this road arch from both sides large limbs over the cars, the road is straight, they are noticeable from long away, and in their Fall undress, something I have felt much before about the world disclosed itself, but now it was clearly of the god expression, not as formerly mostly the “thing” expression. Let me tell you first what it is and maybe it will make some sense.
It is the doingness of things. It’s their activity in the specific principles of how they express. So for the large and bold tree limbs, it was their lengtheningness that leaped out, the being of the angle at their departure from trunk, the perfect linear narrowing so they stay up while going out. It was the active principle of extension, or angleness, of precise occurring from all tree branch possibilities and all means of expressing, of this tree and each tree. There seemed an activity in expressing, a unified geometry all about extending up. For an absolutely vivid experience, it is really hard to relate.
Anyway, the being and the doing of the tree were joined by an intellect of concepts. Concepts of angles and linearity and how to do things that work perfectly. That were an articulation of god Being, and the being was active in the branches and in the branching. Branch, branching and branchness were together in a marvelous fun of description, of god saying “see?”
I couldn’t write this down for you in the car and I said how am I going to remember all this and he said don’t worry I’ll help you.
And he has. He invented wordiness too after all, or one supposes actually, before all.
Oh, he put a marvelous heron overlooking the canal too, as I went by, and it was statuesque dignity ready to strike. The clear meaning of integration of things was there in a full way, the canal existed for the heron, and the fish therein, the heron existed for the canal, they both fit in. God didn’t explain any of this; he just showed me. It was obvious. Rather like, this is how I do things. The vast diversity and extensibility of all things proceeded together each thing for each other.
We humans have figured this out with our brains, as lately we have begun to get and celebrate universal design, integration of Gaia, and so on, but this was felt. It was known. It was unmistakable, perfect, full of joy, godly giddy, very little seriousness or intellect involved but it was not play as is sometimes stated.
Resonantly and vividly obvious, it simply vanishes into the beautiful, gossamer, thin, indescribable.”
*
The above description of being and becoming I summarize as “is does”.
Another example of unity and the branching idea comes from a conversation with the worldwide experts in branching, the trees.
From the Trees – the trees are speaking here
“Tree wisdom is no different from human wisdom. Except that we are much more a collective than the human species at this time. As we communicate with each other through our root systems basking in ground water and this communion is nearly instant and all trees are part of it. We speak with one voice through the Many.
We are multiple beings and so are you. Even within each of us there are multiple beings; you think of them as seeds and this is so but they are also trees in embryo, not children of ours but fully formed beings expressing in a contracted state when they are seen in “seed” form.
You want to know about our “branching”. Yes it is a fractal phenomenon but it is also just treeness. You have marveled at how the outline of our forms are so perfectly consistent and that our smallest branches create a smooth profile against the sky! This is part of our loving of the sky and we do not normally present our brother sky with a ragged picture, we love more regular appearance and so does SKY; there are not for example usually ragged clouds, they have their own symmetry of expression. And as do humans; you have two arms, two legs, two eyes and so on. You are balanced! And as soon as you are able to express in your alpha states and your heart states the symmetry and balance that you exhibit so beautifully in your bodies you will blend more harmoniously into each other and into all nature, as do we. There is much we have to tell you, and perhaps best now for another time, we do not wish to overuse this openness to you. We are always here. Love us as we love you.
We give to you willingly! We give to you as lumber for your houses, and think how thereby we surround you! We have always been companions to humans and it is our joy. Our spokesman today (one tree was a spokesman) perceives you believe that it pains us to be cut up by you, you call it “felling” us but we do not fall we merely come down to you in service. We are a main source of your shelter. We are a main source of your warmth. We are a main source of your communications. We are intimate with you in thousands of ways. And there are times when you reciprocate, lovingly planting our young. We are combined, we are one.”
*
Here is a practical example of unifying intimately with god’s creations. The loving is reciprocal.
Becoming an Honorary Tree
Driving to an appointment a little stressed I said maybe I can talk to my buddy trees and they came right in and I said, hey guys I am a little hopped up think you could help. And right away they said, “Well hop right down”, and I saw a picture of me jumping out of a tree to the ground and feeling right away ‘grounded’ and better. I said you guys are always so calm, with a little envy and they said, “so we will make you an honorary tree! Welcome to us.” I felt all this acceptance and affection from the worldwide community of trees. It felt wonderful.
My morning changed and I was feeling marvelous and happy and affectionate towards everyone.
Later, driving again, I thought it is wonderful to be spread out among all the trees now and I felt extended and wide and light, diffused but real, I started thinking about how great it is to feel that I am the trees because I love them and this means also loving myself. I realized this is a real statement of how it is. We are what we see and loving it is equally loving us. With the correct knowing of who and what we are it’s easy to love self.
It then went beyond description. My field of connection and being went to everything I can think of, all people, sky, planets, earth, everything was all me. And I said to myself, “I Get It.” Meaning both I understand it and I Receive it. This is It.
I began wondering if I could remember this experience until I got home to write it down and immediately the awareness was, “Where would it go?” Nothing can be lost from me because I am everything. It is always somewhere in me and I need not worry about it. These feeling weren’t just satisfying, they were greatly dynamic. While completely stabilized, my thoughts were running around everywhere, up and down alleys and paths of thought and ideas, out to the stars and into the earth and into the inside of me, what I still knew as me, like an intimate historical identity that was expanded everywhere without even the slightest hint of thinking that I was sort of disappearing into everything, that was impossible because it was all a fine continuum of everything. Very hard to describe. Easy to know but very difficult to convey in words. Completely happy and intimate and dynamic and real.
I am not sure why it is called waking up. To me it feels more as if yesterday I was partial. I had only a limited experience of what everything is.
Now I know what One means. If I love you it is just as loving me. I never knew how to love me. Because I never thought it was allowed and that certainly I didn’t deserve it. But now the experience of loving you at the same exact time is me loving me and there is no way for it to change or be otherwise, there is no wiggle room of, well, that’s just a technique, a new age Rx to make us both feel better. No. It’s just knowing that who is doing the loving and who is loved are the same.
I extend to you just as intimately as I am what I used to think of as me. So you help me to love me without doing anything at all, which brings up great gratitude. And very crucially I know that for you it is the same, you extend your identity to me also and there is no problem or collision or logical disconnect, it’s a lovical connect.
Before, it made no sense to me that I create my own reality because I could not figure out how the other person was sovereign also and that they created their own reality which meant that I conditioned them and they conditioned me and that seemed impossible. But that’s not how it is. We’re one, we are part of the whole One that has nothing left out, is all, so they are in the pudding and I am in the pudding and it’s the same pudding and I’m a raisin and they’re a raisin which are just a specific part of the One that can be thought of or described comfortably, and the me they see is One and the they I see is One, while still both raisins, and neither of us actually “creates” any reality.
It’s given, the One is real and already created, and we see the raisin parts of us any way we want which doesn’t limit either of us because that is completely impossible. But it can be real fun to be raisins together. And then if wished we can isolate another part of the One and experience it as ourselves being perhaps birds. This is the best I can do to describe this. It’s hard to understand how yesterday there was a firm logical problem among two different identities creating each other as they wished, and today there isn’t a problem with it at all.
The problem isn’t invalidated as if by a higher and smarter ‘proof’ that yesterday’s idea was wrong. It’s simply that yesterday’s dilemma isn’t there any more. It was there. It’s not like it wasn’t. It’s not like it was a ‘wrong’ thing. It’s just like it doesn’t matter. It was something. But now it’s still something, but not interesting. I don’t understand how this is, but I also don’t feel like I need to understand it. The state of affairs where that something is not limited to what it seemed, is absorbed into just a wordless bigness, so there isn’t much of a way to ponder yesterday’s thoughts any more because they aren’t being replaced by new thoughts.
They are not being replaced by new thoughts that are better or smarter or more logical. It’s beyond description for me to state right now. It’s just the only way things are and have always been. That’s it, things never were the way they were yesterday, so there isn’t any motivation to think about them. I could, but why? I’m only thinking about them now to leave a little record for myself.
Archangel Michael just peeked in for a second and said, “Bill, there is much more”. Then he was gone.
Also I realize now why Ho’oponopono works. It’s because the other person really is me and because of that if they are hurting, I change that, first by apologizing, then asking for forgiveness, then avowing that I love them, and then thanking them for my loving them. I thank them for my loving them for the reason given above, that by loving them I love me.
I do not have to ask them to be different. By the apology and the statement of my loving, they are allowed to be just as nice to themselves as I am to me because I somehow must have left that part of me who is them, out of me when I was so focused incorrectly on who I though I was.
That is why the apology. The apology makes sense, I am apologizing to a part of myself for leaving that part of me out of me and letting that part – the then “other” person — become lost and miserable. It’s simple. This is why Ho’oponopono feels so very powerful and luminous and vibratory, because it is founded on an immense profundity of knowing how things really are.
*
Ho’oponopono is an ancient Hawaiian practice to bring healing to sender and receiver, and the receiver need not know it is being done. This practice works.
Unity with god and with his creation we have unfortunately turned exactly backwards in human history. The human assumption and even doctrine has been that we must deny ourselves in order to find god. Essentially we have thought that to find god we have to hate ourselves. We must deny ourselves and deny the world, love only other people and the postponed meeting with god in heaven. So we have to hate what is here and love what is not here because god is never here, he is waiting up there on a throne of judgment, and probably won’t like us much anyway upon that heavenly meeting, if it ever happens. Put this way, it seems absurd, but this is the way we put it.
Let’s imagine this fantasy dialog when my guardian angel goes to god to intercede for me.
“Sir, thank you for your time, I know you are busy running the cosmos and all. I am here to see you about Bill.”
“Ah, yes, isn’t he the one to whom I sent that wonderful woman? How’s his marriage?”
“Good, sir. Great kids too and they seem to like him okay.”
“Hmmmm, did I try the pillars of fire?”
“No sir, he’s pretty jumpy.”
“Ok, so none of that. I’ve whispered over and over that I love him, right? And that he ought to do the same so we can really get together, since I just don’t make bad stuff, yes?”
“Yes sir. And also he has had the education he wanted, success, great friends. Everyone seems to really like him except him. Basically, you have answered all his prayers, your Supremeness.”
“Gee, you know I really do love the guy. Now I remember him. He’s funny, self effacing, too much so, of course, wants to do the right things, doesn’t really mess up more than the average. Could lose a little weight. He even seems to get The Point, cosmic thoughts and so on. Has the committee met? What do they think is going on?”
“They met, Sir. They don’t understand him.”
“Alright, tell me, if he keeps going like the is, what’s he coming back as next?”
“An accountant in Bangladesh, Sir.”
“Well, that ought to do it. Call me then and I’ll save him from a few deadly accidents or something. Some of these fellows really need drama.”
I cannot jump over loving me to get to god. God is me, and that would mean jumping over god to get to god and then we ‘both’ would miss a part of him that he absolutely, totally, profoundly adores. The me part.
He could jump over himself of course to reach himself from inside me, but would that make any sense in forming a union? He doesn’t wish to skip over us. Why would he wish to? This is why if I do not love myself god seems farther away. Because no matter what I say if I do not like me I cannot genuinely love god, who after all created me. Instead I will blame god for all my misery and self defeat.
Maharishi Yogi expressed most of this idea beautifully. He compared meeting god to meeting a great artist whose work we love. He said if an artist hears that there is in the town a man who is overflowing with appreciation of the artist’s creations and who goes to see them all the time, deeply loves the work of this wonderful man, the artist would say “Let me go and meet this one who loves my work so much.” And he would do so, find the man and shake his hand.
Surely if the artist heard the reverse, that someone hated everything he made, there wouldn’t be much sense in arranging a meeting.
So if I hate me, and all the world, all of which is made by the supreme, and if knowing that god made me I still hate me, it follows that I don’t appreciate god. These ends just do not follow these means.
The full knowing is more than this. The full knowing goes as follows. We are god, though may not yet so know. Being god means that we are all of god. God is everything. If you are everything you cannot be only part of everything though you can convince yourself of that.
Yes you are part of everything also, but this means you are also everything. Even a little bit of infinity is infinite. Totality expresses as a hologram and we might say a fractal hologram to describe its nature as sideways and up and down. So if you try to think of you as only part of god, meaning separated from his fullness, then can we see that we are asking god to not be god? We are asking god to do what we do, skip over his me, which is all god, to get to all god?
To reverse this entire dilemma and find god, we need to start where we find ourselves. I start as me. You start as you. This is where we are born. Can we see that per the calculus of our actual genuine eternal identity which we really are, all we have to do is experience that? Experience who we really are. We will like that. We will love that. It’s quite unimaginable how much we will love that, that’s why we have to experience it and not try to think it out.
Find the true self and our loving of our true self then invites and allows god to disclose to us the incredible rest. It’s allowing, by clearing an agenda of the opposite.
The incredible rest is that the supreme is vividly there. He has always been vividly there, and always vividly here. We are both vividly there and here. The incredible rest is that nobody has ever gone anywhere. The supreme takes the initiative once we signal we are ready by loving everything he creates, including ourselves. In deep grateful love he reclaims himself – his “me”. And then it feels certain that the incredible rest goes anywhere, everywhere, and forever. As AA Michael said, “… there is much more…”
Love had never left love but it returns to love. And this is the incredible rest. At last we can truly rest. We are the rest. We are at rest. We simply allow what is, to be what is. It was so simple it eluded me.
~God does it all~
*
Most of us can’t calm down enough to search for anything except the car keys, not to mention searching for self. This chapter provides some ways we can begin to at least like ourselves enough to allow god to come to us sweetly, easily, and eagerly.
The way out is the way in
It is not impossible for even a very anxious person to cope with and then to triumph over anxiety by becoming a wizard of is. Becoming a wizard of is means learning to be in the now moment. There is no anxiety there. This will be discussed later in detail. Living in the now moment means first finding the entry point to now and then moving in. Happily, finding and inhabiting are the same. Staying there is another matter, and my experience is we don’t stay because an effort to stay there is not a now activity; it is an anxious activity locating our awareness into the future and necessarily abandoning the present. But as should be seen below, this all is not as slippery as it may first appear. There are techniques. They can mostly be considered orientations instead of “steps”, in keeping with the notion here that there are no steps to God. And they aren’t guarantees, but they might help us find other ways that work for us.
The notion of finding an entry point to now is somewhat comic since there really isn’t an entry point, or the entry is everywhere and every-when, really the same as not being any specific place at all. It is instructive to notice that our English language uses the same word to refer to both past and future. We say, “I was happy then.” And we say, “Then I will be happy.” So it was now then. And it will be now then. Nothing new here, we’ve been told these things quite a lot, but the angel is in the details.
After a few significant experiences of radical present moment awareness, one eventually yearns for now. Now becomes sort of like Poo Harbor, and we want to get back.
“Nowstalgia”
So what do nervous people do to find an entry point to where we already are? What do we do to put an end to nowstalgia. There are many things we can do.
Read The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. Mr. Tolle was as miserable as any of us before he found his way. He suffered so much he couldn’t stand it and finally he was lucky. About when he was ready to shatter, he woke up one morning enlightened. Nice work if you can get it. Tolle absolutely gets it. He is a modern writer talking in an accessible way about finding our way Home.
Read Be Here Now by Ram Das. Then read it again.
Do Pranayama. Do it a lot. Pranayama is a simple Hindu breathing technique. Sit comfortably; put the thumb of one hand (I use my right) on your nose, gently closing off the nostril. Put two fingers of the same hand on the other side of your nose – you’re supposed to use the two middle fingers, and your index finger just kind of hangs out in space or perches on the bridge of your nose.
Start with a gentle inhale into the open nostril. At the top of the inhale, switch sides. This means release the nostril under the thumb and close the nostril on the other side with the two fingers. Gently exhale. Then inhale. Switch sides. Gently exhale, inhale, switch. Keep going. That’s it. Each side is an exhale and an inhale; you switch when “full”.
This technique is effective because it is mechanical. Little thinking involved. What is involved is attention. You cannot do this very long if your mind is wandering all over the universe. You just forget what nostril you’re on. You can do this technique no matter how freaked out and panicked you are. It will at least calm you down, a precursor to opening up now for you. And when you do get calmed down, now may open.
The technique of Pranayama is so valuable that when students asked Maharishi (TM founder) what we’d do if we didn’t have TM he is reported to have said, “Lots and lots of Pranayama”.
How long to do it? Ten minutes is fine; it’s more important to do it until you feel a change in awareness, you slowly calm down and come into a gentle focus with the runaway worrying mind slowing down; then go as long as you like. You might fall asleep.
Do Yoga. This is also something you can do in the midst of a panic attack. Find a teacher, any teacher, or a book, and do Yoga, any Yoga. There are a lot of different techniques. From where many of us start, terrifying neurosis, it does not matter which yoga we do. It is a lot more important to do it than to do the right one. The one you do is the right one.
Read anything by Louise Hay. (You Can Heal Your Life). This wonderful lady had been through hell, found her way, and writes beautiful clear prose about getting to now. A very practical and effective book. If you get her, you can’t forget her.
Buddhism. I don’t recommend just reading very much about it. Buddhism can go to your head very quickly. Buddhists have written philosophical tracts on it for thousands of years, and people who are faced with psychological emergency can’t afford at first to think abstract ideas about getting to safety. It’s excessive thinking that gets us into trouble in the first place.
Find the Buddhist notion of ‘Practice’ and start to do it. Find the stuff in the books about ‘mindfulness’, put the book away and do it. There are wonderful local Buddhist centers all across America with dedicated Buddhist practitioners to show you the way for almost no dollars. A Buddhist style of meditation can be very healing. A very actual, intentional, and effective entry point to now. A way to peace. But I recommend doing a practice, not just reading about it.
One thing about the Buddha, he was practical and he didn’t flinch from saying the unsavory. “Life is pain” (translated in many different ways, but let’s just say it this way) was his first teaching observation and then he set about showing how to demolish pain. Billions of people have found their way out by this way in
Other meditation styles. Any meditation. Like Yoga, which you might say is a form of meditation with the body, there are many effective varieties and the one you can do is the one for you.
Simply following the breath even without doing alternate nostril breathing as in pranayama is a wonderful meditation and a way into now. It goes like this: As you breathe, be aware of it as in, “Breathing out, I know that I breathe out … breathing in, I know I breathe in”… (I believe I found these specific words in a book by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh.) You can say the words to yourself, quietly inside as you go. In extreme situations you can say it out loud, maybe not exactly in public…
You will find your mind wandering off, and noticing that is the key, because the part of you that noticed your mind wander away didn’t wander away. And this is the part we want to touch. Once touched, it will lovingly gather the rest of you in. Just gently come back to following the breath. Go as long as you can with comfort.
You can do this anywhere, anytime. Good way to fall asleep. Good way to wake up.
You are following your breath with your attention alone without your fingers to help you know where you are. In some way therefore it is more advanced. If you have trouble with breath meditation, practice with physical pranayama first. Recalling the discussion from chapter one that attention and intention are sacred assets, breathing meditations are premier ways to culture both in self service to real self.
It’s boring? Progress. Because breath meditations bring up the questions, who is running this. Who is doing this. Who is watching. What is going on. Who forgot where I am, left nostril, right nostril, this is all ridiculous. Who picked it up again. Who decided to do this anyway. In breath meditations these questions don’t go away by distractions found in usual activity, because distraction is the point. Distractions are road markers. So, ok, I must be on this stupid pathless path because something that is not out there pulled me off what nostril I was on. What did that? Who did that? Why did I let them? Let who? Who got distracted here? Who distracted the who? What is he doing? This is stupid. I’d rather suffer. Do I have any beer? Am I done yet? It’s raining. I would give a million dollars for the phone to ring.
This may be the first time in our lives we have even noticed the hilarious inner human dialog running around inside like a hamster pleading for a way out of in. Who’s the hamster? Who is out? Who goes in? This is booooooooooring! I’m outta here. You sure are.
Basically we will continue to do this service only once it becomes too painful not to. Once nothing else works to inch us a microsecond towards Poo Harbor. I have never met a westerner who wanted to sit and do nothing — until doing anything else but nothing had become agony.
“When you’re late, walk slower”. A Buddhist saying; the trick to this is not doing it, but remembering to do it. Remembering to do it is a portal to now. As mentioned, the part of you that remembers to do it is the part of you that never left now. Doing it calms you down immediately. You can’t do it without calming down, can you? This technique cannot fail. I’ll leave it to you to experience all the wonderful thoughts doing this brings up, such as “what is late, anyway?”.
——-
There are many benefits to living in the now moment. Let’s focus on the fact that you stop suffering.
For the pathologically anxious, everywhere but now hurts. Worry and obsession about the future change places with the same about the past. Both are marinating in pain and guilt. Somehow one can get stuck in past/future obsession. It’s not worth figuring out how this happened when a way out of it as simple as breathing is available.
Worry
Some might have to give worry its way. For some it is simply too powerful an addiction and I worry, therefore I am. It is worthwhile admitting that putting aside worry may very well be impossible. But there also might be a clever jujitsu move we can make on the worry demon. Let’s say, on the count of 3 I am going to worry. One, two, three, WORRY! So when are we worrying? Well, we are worrying now. When is it possible for me to worry? When is the only time that I can worry? Yes, Now. This proves now is bigger than worry, but it may not solve the issue. Worry is clearly a severe control mechanism of the ego. Sometimes worry has hooks so deep into us that it’s not possible to think our way out of worrying. Sometimes the tyrannical ego cannot be deposed when we wish.
Even though we know worrying in the past about a problem didn’t handle it and we know regretting it in the future won’t handle it, and we know the exit from anxiety is now, this may not give us peace.
A worrier will say, no, it is because I was worrying about it that I prepared for it. Worry is a necessary thing. Maybe worry can’t fix something that has not occurred, but it can keep something from occurring that might. It is irresponsible not to worry. The most cheery brief for worry I have heard is, “If something bad happens, and you weren’t worrying about it, you probably caused it.” True to some, and not funny for them.
We must prepare for emergencies, must we not? Indeed, but when can we prepare? Right.
We may go round and round. As said earlier, the ego does have its place in our lives, but a way must be found for us to decide what that place is. If it’s a tyrant, try loving it to death? If we need medication, god makes medications too. Our language tutorial again, meditation and medication one character apart and I may just be the character. If my ego is blocking my way to who I really am, this ego is in more trouble than it gives, for eventually, one day, this must and will end.
Emergency
If there is some emergency in my now, I am handling it. After all it is an emergency. I am not worrying about it. In emergency, panicked you may be, but it is real panic, not anxious panic. And, just because it is happening now, you can handle it. Now is the only place to handle it because, as Louise Hay says, now is the only place it is possible to make a decision.
If there is pain but not an emergency happening in your now, every source I have ever found credible on this topic points out that when you think correctly about it, that is, accurately and honestly, you will realize that you are OK. And this means all the time. All now. You are not suffering. In the now you are OK.
Emergency necessarily plunge us into now, where we are not suffering, as we deal with the emergency. I believe this is why so many people create emergencies and drama in their lives. It’s a stupid way to temporarily end the suffering of anxiety and worry, and unfortunately for many, it works well enough to become an addiction. I freak out, therefore I am.
I did not accept this. My objection was what if I am in physical pain? The sources of wisdom on this idea say that even in the midst of physical pain I am OK. I don’t bear pain well or easily, but if I am honest I have to admit that I also don’t know how to deal with pain in the now. I’m in the past worrying about how I got this, or I’m in the future, worrying about how long it will last, how to solve it, and will it get worse. I am so overshadowed by the pain that I cannot even ask who is hurting.
Note, if the pain is an emergency, I am solving it. I am screaming for a nurse, or I am dialing 911. If the pain is not an emergency and I stay in the now, I finally had to admit it actually does not seem so bad, because I am in touch with the part of me that is not in pain. This part is an inhabitant only of now. To simply touch this part of us is a pain reducer.
This is becoming a wizard of is.
Of course we pick up the phone and order more pain ‘killer’ if we need it, but we do that in now. It is the only place in which to do it, so we might as well experience this fact, since with it arrives contact with our now self, who isn’t hurting.
If we are not in pain, being in now can liberate us from worry, in spite of the above caveats. Being embedded in now we can recognize future threats but they should not be overwhelming if we really are in the now moment. The platform of OK supports us.
I am OK in this now right now.
Let’s define “OK”. I have enough air (else it’s an emergency). Enough water, food, and other essentials are available. I can think any thought that I want, including the one that it’s now. Nobody is attacking me. They may in the future, but that’s not now. If they do, I will deal with it then, like I have before; if it’s an emergency, I’ll be OK because there won’t be time to worry, I’ll be fully engaged in handling the emergency. I cannot handle it now, because it’s not happening and so not available for fixing, distracting, or hurting me.
OK is an exit from the field of anxiety, by definition. It also grows by itself to become eventually what the sages have called bliss, but for many among us it is quite enough to have suffering stop, even for a second. One second of OK imperils a lifetime of anguish. It is a way out. And the way out as said many times here bears multiple repeats, and is the way in. Into here, into now, into where I really am. Where do I go to feel better? Nowhere except here, now. I need nothing to go nowhere other than to change my current thought. To realize that it’s now.
Am I in now when I am not in now? Of course I am. When else could I not be in now?
Even changing my current thought is not needed; I have billions of thoughts and there is no need for more. All I have to do is select one that brings me into now by watching them, and watching itself brings me into now, sometimes with a bang. We recognize and welcome this bang as slamming the door to then behind us.
How do I tell it’s now?
Following are some clues.
Perceptions
Colors get sharper. They become richer as the darks get darker and lights lighter. I.E., contrast increases. Edges become noticeably finer and more detailed.
Perspective deepens. Figure / Ground phenomena become more apparent. You’re noticing everything more clearly so you are also noticing the relationships among things more completely. This is nice to experience and may be entirely new at first.
More is noticed. You see, and hear things you did not before. Crickets, birds, car horns, are more noticeable. And in the case of car horns, they are less irritating, too.
Things seem just there. Judging them as positive or negative, as desirable or not lessens. Judging may disappear entirely. Please do not mistake this for apathy when it happens to you. It is the beginning of full appreciation for everything. When forcefully picking one thing over another you really cannot appreciate
either.
Justice. As judging begins to leave awareness, we begin having the experience of “just is”. Could English be playing with us again? Is there some relationship between just-is and justice? When I am extremely and nowly OK do I yearn for justice? If I should have a thought of it, where does now go? And with it my OK?
Getting to know me. Until the growth of this experience of what might be called genuine justice, automatically constructed in now moments, people are missing themselves as stated earlier. Nowstalgia is a lament not just about not being here now, but not knowing my true self – who isn’t here. I know all the other dimensions of my experience; I know it is raining; I know it is midnight. But, as Sri Mooji ask us so constantly, Who knows this?
Conceptions
The sense of spaciousness, presence, peace, in a cathedral is incredible, palpable, extreme. This begins to occur inside of what we think of as our ‘head’ as we let us be here now. Normal experience is that our mind is inside our head encased in bone and in there is where we think. This sense of confinement may relax a little. Our sense of where we are aware may expand a great deal. It may be faint. In any case, congratulations, we did it, we entered now.
This enrichment of perspective was put into words by a friend who reported seeing a saint – it doesn’t matter which one. She said he “relativised the space in the area”. This is a beautiful if abstract way of putting it. It is abstract. But it is concrete when it happens.
It happened seeing in person Mother Teresai walk down an aisle in church. She took over the space. She was the center, and the church moved around her.
It happened in New York City seeing Maharishi Mahesh Yogi on the stage of the Felt Forum hundreds and hundreds of seating rows away. There was Maharishi. And there was everything else.
It happened in Taipei in what is called the night market, of all places. There was a young Buddhist monk with shaved head and begging bowl. He was standing 200% still in a yogic posture on one leg with his other leg bent and its foot on the standing leg knee.
He was looking straight ahead and I was behind him but he was looking at me. He was figure; all else was ground. I walked part way around him at a little distance in inner awe. My Chinese hosts wouldn’t let me give him any coins and pulled me away. But I never left. Years later, I am still there.
In an experience of now with or without a saint around, the space around you can become “relativised”. There is you and everything else. This is because heretofore there was just everything else. Now, you are there too.
A way to recognize now is when your sense of self becomes so expanded that you may if walking experience yourself walking through yourself. You may become both figure and ground; you might become both the trail and the one walking it. You can have a definite experience of moving through you. This is a valid experience on this learning path and lets you know you are on it. Walking or sitting, doing something or nothing, awareness may dawn in us that the center is everywhere.
Enlightened ones tell us there is a step beyond the relative distinction of you and what usually seems to not be you. Sages have said “Everything is viewed in terms of my self”. Entry to now opens infinite possibility. If not, at any rate, it’s a long way from anxiety. An inspiring vision may be helpful as you work through techniques that seem designed only to get something to cease, pain and anxiety. As we know intuitively, there is a lot more to life than the absence of pain. The road through now leads us literally to wherever we wish.
Summary:
Now is inescapable. It is easier to let it be so. We were here and now there and then. We will still be here and now there and then.
In an emergency, it’s now. In pain, it’s now, and being in now is a pain killer. If it’s not an emergency and I’m not in pain, it’s also now, and being in now frees me from much anxiety and makes me a Wizard of Is because only now is where I can do anything and then I can do anything. Worry is only past or future. You can’t make choices there.
Now is free of worry and full of choice. It is truly the only place to be.
The correlation between finding now and finding self is becoming clear. Perhaps some orientations or new habits of thought mentioned here can be helpful. People today are sharing many ways for us to find self. There may on earth be 7 billion ways to find home, but there is one home and we all get the door-key at birth. Everybody breathes.
*
It’s been said through the ages that god is “nearer than the nearest” to us.
People often ask how to distinguish between an inner voice that we know is ‘mine’ versus an inner voice that we know is not the me we have always heard inside.
M: Well, it looks like we’re halfway there, god – (in writing this book).
G: I’m all the way there.
M: God, I’m lost!
G: Until you have me you don’t know where you are. After you have me it doesn’t make any difference.
M: I’m scared, god!
G: I’m god, Scared.
M: If I get much happier, I will pass out!
G: The idea is to pass in.
These responses seem to be beautifully tuned to our own personality. Which makes it impossible at first to distinguish who is speaking. Add to this the fact that if you tell people you are god they put you away but if you tell people they are god, they don’t, and we are all set up to ignore an amazing and common aspect of inner experience. A business colleague who also heard from god internally once said to me, “You know, we are officially crazy. If they find out about this, they lock us up.” While he was kidding, we both knew the point.
Almost everyone wants to talk to god. But here might be 7 billion godly communication styles. How do we tell when we hear one for us? We don’t know how to tell when thoughts, voices, images, feelings, we have inside are communications from god and when they are our own. This confusion plus the frequent ridicule and even fear associated with hearing voices cause us to give up on it.
For me it started at about age 18 when god flew in the window one day when I was listening to some classical music. Nothing was said, just a clear feeling of lordly presence flew in with a breeze, looked around, and faded away. Crazy, yes? Yes, and while it was an intimate and lovely experience, it had no context in my life. But if I dismissed it, how is it that for this (classified) number of years, I remember it perfectly?
I am convinced, in fact I “know”, that all people have experiences of communicating with god. For some of us it is in language, some in images, for some it is feelings, visions, and so on, but everyone hears from the Supreme. Some feel god in their children, some have a vague feeling of god’s presence, and so on. Some get knocked off their horses. We see and feel god in nature, in animals, in the sky, everywhere. But it is in this “first contact” experience that lies the opportunity we often miss. And it is in the first contact experiences that we reject what is happening to us and in us.
There are hotlines for mental health, overeating, abuse, even fishing, but no deity hotlines? Humans have organized to help each other with all manner of problems and solutions, but there aren’t any 800 numbers to ask if I have been personally contacted by the CEO and Chairman of the Board of the entire universe of universes?
———————-
Hi, God Hotline, what’s your question?
Oh, hi, I just heard this rushing wind in my mind, and it seemed to have a smile on it and a feeling of love, but it scares me, what is it?
No worries, it’s god, just ask what took so long and ask any question you want.
*
Hello, God Hotline, may you help you?
Oh, this is crazy but I just heard someone say in my head, “You are loved”.
It’s god. Tell her you love her too.
*
God hotline, what’s your question?
Er, well, is this call being recorded?
Only by god, did he give you this number?
Uh, no, I don’t think so, I just saw it on a billboard.
Who do you think put up the billboard, what’s your question?
Well, I was walking my dog, and I was hung over and feeling awful because my whole life is a mess. Then my dog looked at me and I swear to god smiled at me, and I heard inside, How can you be so messed up if this dog loves you so much?” It scared me half to death! My dog doesn’t talk!
Haha, I understand, it’s crazy, right?
Yeah, insane.
That’s OK, I am informed to tell you that was the infinite lord of all space and time checking in with you to ask you to look into your dog’s eyes and talk to god through, what is the dog’s name?…
George.
… talk to god through George.
Are you kidding?
No, but god may be kidding with you, only your guardian angel knows for sure. They both use any means they think will get to you to get to you.
*
Godline, may he help you?
May who help me?
God, isn’t that why you called?
Yes, I guess so.
And …
So, I pray, and pray, and pray, but I never hear anything back.
One second … oh, ok, so what happens at the end of your prayers?
Nothing, silence.
Silence. When else do you hear silence?
What do you mean?
I mean do you ever hear nothing during the day?
No.
Do you ever hear nothing at night when you are not praying?
No.
So how do you know you are hearing silence?
Well, it feels like silence.
Meaning…
Meaning I don’t know, it’s just different, sort of like nobody’s there.
But until then there was somebody there?
Yes.
Who?
Well, I was there.
OK, so how did you know you were there?
What? What do you mean?
So you are there, and you are praying. How do you know you are there when you pray?
I guess because I can hear myself.
So then after you say “Amen” you can’t hear yourself, because you are not talking, right?
Yes
So does that mean you are not there any more?
No, I’m still there.
Ah. OK, so you can know you are there when you aren’t doing anything.
I guess so, yeah.
And then what happens again, at the end?
I say Amen and then I hear nothing.
You said there is just silence.
Yes.
OK, do you hear silence any other time in your life but at the end of one of your prayers?
Oh, no, I guess not.
Great, so silence is something you “get” through prayer, is that right?
Ah, alright.
So you’re still there after you say amen, and suddenly also there is there a silence that you never hear except then.
I guess so.
What does the silence feel like.
I don’t know.
No, really, is there any feeling to the silence?
Hello, still there?
Yes, I just don’t know what you mean.
No problem, we’re just talking about something you do every night and that never gets answered, right?
Yes.
And we see that something unusual happens at the end of every nightly prayer, is that not correct? That at the end of every prayer you perceive a silence that you don’t perceive at any other time in your day.
Well, all right, but I don’t see how this means anything.
Say “Amen” right now.
What?
Please say “Amen” right now, OK?
OK, “Amen”.
Good did you hear any silence? Before I asked you?
No.
Why?
Because I only hear it when I am trying to talk to god.
Wonderful, so we know something happens every time you talk to god that doesn’t happen usually but that it makes you think he’s not there.
Well…
All right my friend, I think we could go on, but I am getting the feeling you don’t need to right now, is that correct?
Still there?
Uh, yes, I’m just confused a little. But I guess I see there is something there. Is there anything else I can do to find out more?
Sure, he says you should listen louder.
Listen louder?
That’s what he says, listen louder, and he’ll be more there.
Oh my God, OK, OK, thanks. Bye.
*
Godline, we tell you you’re you, can I answer any questions?
Yes, what is the meaning of the Universe?
Scott Adams answered that question, it’s 42. Anything else?
Hahaha, good one, I knew that.
Great, what?
That 42 thing.
Right, Bill Cosby did too when they taught him in kindergarden “one and one is two”, but he then said, “yeah, what’s a two”.
Hahaha, that’s a good one, what’s a two.
So if the meaning of the universe is 42 but we don’t know what a 2 is, where do we go from that?
Well, I don’t have any idea.
Ok, thanks for calling the God Hotline!
Wait, wait!
I don’t know but yesterday when I was walking to work I got the strangest feeling…
Which was …
Which was that I wasn’t there.
Oh, wow, what was that like?
Well it was OK, it was just weird. It was like everything sort of stopped.
OK
And then what happened?
And then I don’t know why, I just said, “Who’s there?”
Then?
Then I heard “we are, who else?”
Who said that?
Well it was me, but it wasn’t me. I mean, it was my voice, but I wouldn’t say anything like that. And I DON’T hear voices, OK, I mean, I NEVER hear voices, I’m not like that, OK?
Anything else about the voice?
It kinda glowed.
Glowed?
Yeah, it had a sort of neon sign feeling, but not too much…
Ever talk to yourself before in neon?
No, never did that, but I thought I better call in case…
In case what?
In case it was something I ought to know about.
Ah, well, I am getting the feeling you do know about it.
Uh, yeah, I just don’t know.
I understand, you mean you think it was you telling you that you AND you were there, sort of?
Yeah, I guess, sorta.
Tell me more.
Well it was like a voice, yes, and my voice, but not my voice exactly, and it felt bigger like you say, but it also felt more like me than me, does that make any sense?
Perfectly. Yes, it was like you and a you you knew you knew, but you never knew you knew you. How about that?
Yes, exactly, you too?
Yes, me too, we have that all the time.
Who do you think the you is?
Well, like an angel?
Sure, why not. So maybe there is an angel inside of you, is that OK?
Yeah, I can’t tell anybody, but it doesn’t bother me.
Ever hear angels before?
No, not that I know of.
So somehow this angel felt a little bit like you, yes?
Well, she didn’t feel weird, or like outside me, or like accusing me or anything.
She felt familiar?
Yeah.
But you never talked to her before.
Right.
So how could somebody you never talked to feel familiar?
Gosh, I don’t know, you’re supposed to have all the answers.
No, that’s the point, it’s you who have all the answers, I’m just here to let you finally tell somebody you do, who won’t turn you into the Feds.
Uh.
Sorry, so then some personality or entity, is in your head and answered you when “everything stopped”, is that it.
Right.
And you are wondering …
Well I just want to know what’s going on.
Did you get a sense this was somehow special? A special experience?
Yes.
So how special?
So like it was important. Like looking for something. Hearing maybe something nobody else hears, but I can’t tell anybody really.
Did it feel friendly?
Oh, yes, for sure, real friendly, but not pushy, not sort of trying to actually make me do anything or anything.
OK, so you asked, “Who’s there?” And there was this friendly answer that seemed not to need or want anything from you said “We are of course”, do I have that exactly right?
Yup.
So, Sir, why was it “we”?
But that’s why I am calling you, to find out!
And why would it say “we”, instead of anything else.
Well obviously if there was a question and an answer, somebody answered and that makes two.
But I thought you said it didn’t really feel like anybody else.
Not exactly, it felt like somebody new that I already knew, but never knew before, you know?
I do, and this answerer, did she or hew want anything from you? Was there any sort of instruction to keep talking to them, that anything was going to happen, or that they were waiting for more questions?
Oh, no it was really different, something answered and then just waited.
Waited, is that how it was? How do you know it was waiting?
Well, I didn’t realize it then but now you say, I felt like it was still there.
OK, good, still there. But not saying anything, right?
Yes, right.
So is it still there now?
What the hell are you talking about?
No, you are talking about it, I just asked you if something you heard from and then it was waiting, is still waiting…
Holy cow.
Holy cow? Why is the cow holy.
No, I mean, wait a minute, wait a minute …
Been a minute, what’s up.
You asked me if it is still there.
I did.
How did you know it?
Know what?
That it is still there.
And what is it doing?
It’s still waiting!
Waiting for what?
I don’t know, it’s not waiting for anything, it’s just a waiting thing. This is totally, I mean totally, spooky. It’s like it could answer more questions, or not, or just be there, it doesn’t want anything, it’s just there.
You are making me go crazy!
Hahaha, I don’t have the power to do that, do you feel like this is crazy?
Yes, I do. That’s kinda why I called, I don’t know what this is!
Well you told me you knew what it was, that it’s really you.
Well I didn’t mean that. Or at least I didn’t mean that now. It’s like something else.
Fine, is it still there?
Yes, not as much.
Going away?
Not exactly, just not waiting as much, sort of going into the background.
Ok so is that crazy?
I guess not, it’s better, not as weird.
Tell me, am I going nuts?
No sir, you are going sane. You’re just not familiar with it and like everything new it’s a bit strange, and I think if you are ready anytime to think about this presence you felt, and ask it what it is, maybe you will find it’s OK.
Well, I’m not sure. Can I call you back if anything else happens.
Oh, absolutely, I’d like to hear from you. Just like your new presence, I am always here. Bye for now
———————————-
So perhaps if we had a place like this to call when we have an experience of ourselves that isn’t like the selves we were born with, it would help. If we knew that everybody else has this kind of thing happen also, it wouldn’t feel upsetting if we could get a little validation.
And we could all go sane together.
*
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Finding The Supreme 