Quote from Seeing-Knowing

This moment of writing these words is exactly the same moment that they are being read ‘there’ wherever that may appear to be in space and time. Hundreds of apparently different eyes may scan these words and within apparently different moments in space and time.
There is only One Moment and this is THAT moment. It is timeless.

Anticipation

I have come across what I feel is a gem of a DVD. It is called Broken Saints. It was originally a series of short films released on the Internet.

It has become one of those things I do not want to end. I am savouring the anticipation. We seem to have so much of that taken away from us nowadays. Previews are so prevelant. We see it so often with TV programes and Cinemas. It can sometimes feel that a trailer gives me so much that I can think that there is not much point in seeing the film. Our family has taken to shutting down or changing channel to avoid trailers. What happened to the element of surprise. Are people so fearful that we will not watch? Oh the joy of surprise.

A little distraction there. I will come back to Broken saints soon.

Resistance

This has been with me for many a year. It is a piece by Rabindranath Tagore from the book Gitanjali. It struck a cord all those years ago and still does now if not more so!

Obstinate are the trammels, but my heart aches when I try to break them.
Freedom is all I want, but to hope for it I feel ashamed.
I am certain that priceless wealth is in thee, and that thou art my best friend, but I have not the heart to sweep away the tinsel that fills my room.
The shroud that covers me is a shroud of dust and death; I hate it, yet cover it in love.
My debts are large, my failures great, my shame secret and heavy; yet when I come to ask for my good, I quake in fear lest my prayer be granted.

Flying

Well one of my birthday gifts was a flight in a bi-plane. Mixed emotions, at one extreme total fear and conviction of my inability to actually do it. Then the joy an exhilaration when up there.

I have flown in the past in a Cessna, but this beats those experiences and the first thought upon landing was that I wanted to be back up.

It was not as if I did not have moments of fear when up there because I did. But they were easily out-weighed by the the positive feelings.

I used to love reading Richard Bach books. Partly because of his love and passion for flying, which he conveyed so wonderfully in his writings. I am sure being in the open cockpit contributed to the sense of freedom I had.

Quote

“I don't kill flies but I like to mess with their minds. I hold them above globes. They freak out and yell, 'Whoa, I'm way too high!' ”

BRUCE BAUM

50

So it has finally hit, my 50th birthday. The last year has been painful and is not even over yet. The inner turmoil is like nothing I have experienced before. As I have become more aware of the void and my true nature, I have become even more aware of the frailty and impermanence of this shell and how it is in truth nothing. However I still have to live this illsionary life and that appears to create an inner conflict. How do I reconcile both worlds? Answer - I do not. They cannot be, as one of then does not really exist. The sense of discomfort comes from the illusion and any thing I do to resolve it is putting my attention on the wrong way. On the illusion. So where do I put it? Who puts it somewhere else? In the Course in Miracles it says that we have a decision maker. The part that decides separation or truth. Who is this decision maker? How do I recognise him?

There is no such thing........

There is no such thing as far away. Apart from being a book by Richard Bach, it is a realisation I had the other day. It hit me quite hard. We often come across teachers telling us that time does not exist. As time and space a interwoven (we are told by some famous theory), space would not as well. That is what hit home the other day. I can still sense it a little. There is in truth no distance between this apparent separate self I perceive myself as and the monitor I am reading this on.

Of Course................

Most of the time the answer is "No".

Question

A question that I find useful - "Am I big enough to hold all this?"
Answer "yes" and I find I am at peace, identifying with my true self.
Answer "No" and I find myself identifying with my small untrue self, known as the ego.

Remember

Time to remember there is nowhere to go.
Time to remember there is no distance to travel.
Time to remember there is no time.

Remember? Have I ever really forgotten? Or am I just pretending?

?

Where do I go from here, which is the way thats clear?

David Essex

Where is the pull?

The apparent pull between the two worlds can be hard work. Especially when I forget that there is only one world and the other is an illusion.

Confusion & Conflict

I do not want the answer. After all what would I do. I need this struggle and conflict, it defines me. All these years of seeking have defined me. Who would I be without them? Yet I am finding they have no weight anymore. There is something more truthful arising. Something more real. Only if I attempt to grasp it enough to define it, I loose it. The whole of this is becoming more and more surreal. But I still hang on in there and try and make it real and serious.

A section from On Having No Head by Douglas Harding sums it up.

......who of us would want to become finders, as long as our search so meaningfully - so nobly! - structures our time and wards off boredom, and as long as the nothing - which some say lies at the end of our quest - reads at this safe distance much more like a unveiled threat than a veiled promise? No we have every reason to remain humble seekers! We are not enlightened! The fact is that in us all lurks an existential terror, a powerful and altogether natural resistance to what - seemingly - amounts to sudden death and annihilation.

Complexity v Simplicity

Right, so here I am again, facing what was a blank page. I want to say something poignant and meaningful and yet all I have is a jumble.
Complexity is only of the ego. Small me that does not really exist. So this complexity I am experiencing is truly an illusion.
Simplicity is truth. What more can be said.
So there is nothing I can do with complexity. It is similar to a knotted ball of string where you pull on one bit and it gets worse. If I try and sort it out I am I am working on the problem with the problem. What hope is there of getting anywhere? (A voice in my head screams "I know all this") Obviously I do not, otherwise I would not be getting myself into this state.
I am sensing how automated this process of creating problems is. All the work I have done on myself over all these years has at best given me small glimpses of the space that exists without all this stuff. Yet in a way it makes it worse. As a friend said the other day, that it just seems to make being here all the more painful. It is. Having the knowledge of the unreality of this world does seem to get in the way of being here. Yet I know that is not the way it needs to be. After all the feedback we get from people living in truth or at least a large degree of it; seems to be that they can take all this less seriously. All that appears to be happening to me is that it is getting harder work.
This is my choice. As ACIM says all this is down to us making just one decision. That is deciding that the one tiny made idea - that we could be separate from God - could be true. All decisions are based on that on. So the complexity is my decision and I can choose differently now. It is denying the realty that I appear to have chosen. Letting go and putting my trust and faith in .......... the void. I am feeling the resistance to the letting go. What I keep failing to remember is that the resistance is not real. The way it feels to me, is a great potential loss.
This prompts a big question, what am I loosing if this does not exist? The immediate answer is ME. This me is a mental construct that consists of lots of labels. So it is just an idea, a thought, nothing so real and tangible as what I can experience when they are all dropped.
Immediatly I am greeted with the thought "What do I do with this?" Answer ..... nothing. Somewhere I find it in me to decide on the voice for God, Truth. Everytime, moment by moment. When realise I am not, then I forgive myself.

Headless

Thanks heavens I can loose my head occasionally. Well when I remember to practice being headless. I first came across this practice many years ago when on a Rebirthing workshop in Glastonbury. A fellow Rebirther spoke about it and for some reason it impacted on me. It interested me, like so many things at that time (after all I was a veracious seeker, that was another one to my collection of answers) and I did not truely get the impact of what it was showing at the time. But then later on after reading On Having No Head by Douglas Harding and trying out his experiments, I got more value out of it.
If you are interested click on the link above and try out the experiments yourself.
As I have practiced this it has given me more and more insights. Some of them put me into a space where I have realised something that has been concept for so long. Words of wisdom from great teachers have (for a short while at least) been real.
What I have realised with this and through the culmination of all my seeking is that I have to be willing to let go of being a seeker. By its nature it will prevent me from finding.

The limitations of language have been thrown to light with a conversation I was having with one of my daughters. We were talking about seeking and finding truth and a question she asked me rather than setting me off on a path of answering her, an explosion happened internally where there were many answers at once. Anyone of these answers would have fitted but was not enough. What I wanted, was to convey the whole experience. It was as if the experience/answer more than the sum of the little answers.
Is this not what we do with all our lives? Take a little bit of things, separate and isolate them. This includes our the way we see ourselves as a small separate object within something larger. When in fact we are something infinite and without boundaries that contains everything else. As the Course in Miracles says - There is nothing outside of you.
In fact the other day I picked up ACIM and opened it expecting to get just what I needed to read, as so often happens. But not this time. I was on a lesson so I went to the next, then the next and so on. Then suddenly it hit me, I had turned to lesson 36 which says - My holiness envelopes everything I see. Bang, there I was Headless again.

Additions

We have two new additions to the family. Here they are.


Giving much pleasure to the whole family.

Headless Way

This weekend has been varied. One of variations has been a meeting along with others, with Richard Lang. Richard had been invited to a Nandini Satsang to talk to us about the Headless Way. Now I have known about this way for a good number of years now and was grateful for this opportunity to meet him.
In this gathering we were given a number of exercises (shown on the web site) with awaken us to the headless state. There is much to this technique that I like. One is the simplicity, another is the immediacy of the experience. At the same time this can be one of the most challenging things about it. That is because we appear to so like complexity. In fact I think we need it to such a great extent that we will create it at times. Because without those distractions where would we be? At peace maybe. Could we really cope with that for any reasonable amount of time. Now when I am headless, then I may still have problems. However I have the space to allow them to be. I become the space big enough to hold everything - the void. So I end up with both states at the same time, the normal everyday small self and the infinite self.
Give these exercises a try and experience what you do. Its well worth it. You may find that not everyone works for you at a specific time, however it might at another.

Synchronicity

Synchronicity; I had a wonderfully disturbing series of them the other day when speaking to somebody. I went to an event in my home town called Breathe. It was a festival of green and alternative therapies. Felt out of place and no real connection with anything anybody was doing. It all felt very much a space I had been in, in the past and used to have a lot of energy for. However as I walked around I was approached by a woman selling one of those wonder-berry drinks, which I have to say was very nice and just the 30ml a day would not have been enough for me. Any way she starts asking questions which I feel a little awkward with. I wanted to come back with answers that to most people would be a little off the wall. However I did come out with them as I felt a little cornered and they were understood. I was obviously meant to be and we spent half an hour plus bouncing off each other. I like to feel we both gained from this, I certainly did. What surprised me was the amount of synchronicity that occurred in that time.
Synchronicity is one of those things that we are told that they are signs that you are on the right path. I certainly used to look out for them and feel better about where I was and what I was doing the more I had. However I now rarely experience them and it does not trouble me, because if am seeing them as more important than other parts of my life, I would be creating division that does not really exist. Where unity and oneness are the only true reality then if I am to make something more special than something else then I would loose sight of truth.

Struggle

Is there anything is this world that is not a struggle? That is certainly not what I am experiencing at the moment.
As long as I see myself as this little me inside a bigger reality then I have misidentified who I really am. This will by default will create some sort of friction. So how do I let that reality go? In my experience any way that is simple will do it. That is not to say it is easy! We (that is human race) appear to like complexity. The more complex it is the greater the distraction from truth. In fact anything that perpetuates the the illusion that we are here and that we have somewhere else to be, keeps us here. So there we go chasing material items and never being satisfied. Even when we think we have advanced and see the folly in doing that and move on to mental, emotional or spiritual seeking, we are still stuck as a seeker. Whilst I identify with being a seeker I will never find. Without anything to do (seeking) I am left with ............... ? A void. That will never do. I can feel the threat in that as I write this. The next step I want to take is to remove the threat. I can only try and remove something I perceive as real. I can feel myself getting caught up in doing something to change things. Oops, once again I have lost awareness of my true self.

Transition

Next birthday to arrive is my 50th which I am sure has something to do with why I am doing this blog. The last two major birthdays (30th & 40th) have shook things up but nothing to compare with this one.

Am I really going to loose all this. Yes. Sometimes the impact of that shakes me to the core. I have been seriously wondering how I am going to cope.
Then I get moments where I do not want anything to change because of the deep sense of peace that comes with them. Usually it is out in nature. I regard myself as fortunate when it comes to my journey to and from work. I drive through the countryside from one town to another and at the moment it is changing daily as it gets greener and greener. With window open, even queuing for traffic lights can be a blessing. A brief time out in the day that is a blessing and something I am very grateful for.

These are images of where I drive.

I know this is all so transitory and yet .............. I have these moments when I feel that stillness that underlies everything. That space where nothing changes.

A quote I recall from the past - "You are where your attention lies"
Most of the time mine, lies out there and is very small, that's when I feel discomfort of one sort or another.

A Big Jolt

I was talking about my relationship with ACIM. So I regarded myself as a serious student and that I could talk my way round the course pretty well. I believed that I knew what it was saying. Then probably a couple of years ago I came across a to be released book that I read snippets out of on Amazon. It was called Disappearance of the Universe by Gary Renard. It was an instant knowing that I would get this book. Like many Course in Miracle students this book had a huge impact on my understanding of the Course. So now, although I have the right teaching for me, it is not an easy journey. I grok what it means and to my ego it can feel a huge threat to its well being and survival. I hope I can elaborate on what I mean by this at a later date.
Now off to watch the highly spiritual programme of Red Dwarf.

A Course

Feeling slightly more relaxed about this blogging.

This morning I have come back to A Course in Miracles not that I can leave it. I first came across the book about 25 years ago. A bookshop I was working in had it on the shelf at a time when I was soaking up anything I was drawn to. I would be drawn to a book and always read it cover to cover. It was always what I needed at the time and felt that I was uncovering something I new anyway. I was very much into Paganism at the time so it could appear to be a strange choice. This book though was not read. It sat there for many a year, with a few tentative dips into it. Not until I got into Rebirthing did I start to take it more seriously. Even then I was not getting it, I may have though I was, but ......
As time goes on I finely work through the lessons with a friend. I start to gain a greater understanding. It stays with me. I cannot loose it no matter how hard I try. I keep trying to find the answer elsewhere including going back to old books. But every time I was brought back to ACIM. I now see this flitting around as an avoidance or resistance. I still do it. I can even see what I am going to do sometimes before I do it. So as ACIM says I forgive myself for not doing it.

So today I put on A Course CD as I am driving to work. It was one of those times when I new I was hearing what I needed to hear. A reaffirming that it is right for me.

So I have finally done it.

I hear artists can have trouble putting the first mark on the canvas and I think I have been having the same difficulty.
Now I have done it I find myself at a loss for words. So much has been passing through my mind planning what I wanted to do, then ............
Not really even that sure why I want to do this. I just feel driven.

I find myself at a strange point in my life, well it feels that way. I am approaching 50. So what is the big deal? For me their are thoughts and feeling arising that are new and at times overwhelmingly confusing.

I have been on a journey of investigation into finding that thing that is best known as God. Other words such as Truth, Spirit, Peace, Freedom and Love have been used at times, to make it more palatable to different people.

I can see how I have passed from one teaching to another. Taken on beliefs, professing them to be true, trying them on like a suit. They would appear to fit for a while and then I would find that they never totally fit comfortably. I would evangelise about them to others believing for a while that I had found the answer.
The list seems endless - Food, Zen, TM, Rebirthing, NLP, A Course in Miracles to name a few.
So what is the difference now? I want to jump in with an answer, only there is not one ready to hand. That is part of the discomfort, certainly not a pat answer. Maybe it is the other way round, an answer is emerging for me, I am just not comfortable with it.

A ramble I know, but better to come I hope.