Anxiety and Rationality

In another forum, a discussion around catastrophic events lead to these points. This is how the mind behaves when run by the ego concept of being separate.

Firstly, the mind is not satisfied to simply have experiences. It needs to organize and categorize them in some way – good/bad, more/less, happy/sad, etc. People tend to jump to conclusions to ‘tidy things up’, even if there is insufficient evidence for a conclusion. Loose ends cause uncertainty and anxiety, which most people wish to avoid. (and this is the seed of resistance) If conclusions can’t easily be found, people look to ‘authorities’ to provide “reasons” and reassurance and often, blame.

If those conclusions satisfy (by resolving anxiety), they come to form the underpinnings of belief. We then look for information that supports our beliefs and tend to reject information that does not. Ego wants to know it’s right and will make others wrong to support this.

For many people, beliefs become part of their identity. For example, a statement like “I am an American who believes in freedom of the press and the right to bear arms.” That is not just a political position but part of both what they believe in and who they see themselves to be.

It’s the association of those beliefs with identity that makes events like 9/11 or the financial meltdown more difficult. It is not just a difficult and consequential chain of events but a challenge to beliefs and personal identity. There is not only cognitive dissonance, but emotional and personal dissonance as well.  It gets very personal. This greatly amplifies the fear factor and inclines people to join bandwagons or belief systems and take sides.

It’s notable that when people are afraid enough, they switch into ‘fight or flight’ mode. Blood vessels are constricted in the digestive system and frontal lobes of the brain to provide energy to the limbs. This lets you run fast but it also makes you more stupid. If there is not a resolution, the stress can continue, increasing the likelihood of irrationality. Delusion and denial would certainly be consequences if they are seen as a means to relieve anxiety.

The trick is in learning the truth of who you are. The unchanging silent peace within. When integrated deeply enough, the storms of life will blow without disturbing that center. Instead of bringing fear and anxiety, the storms blow it away. No craziness, no denial needed. Peace within begets peace without.
Davidya

Silence in the Storm

A great talk by Gangaji on life’s challenges, expectations, change and loss.

“In the heart of space is silence… Silence that is who you are, silent awareness. That your body has appeared in, that events of your life, events of history have appeared in, and yet the silent remains, at peace, in love, and conscious of itself. Not silence as a lack of. Silence as filled with itself, so much of itself that there is nothing else.”
– Gangaji, Feb 09 in San Rafael

She also mentions the Zen poem - my house burned down, then I could see the moon.

The rest:

The Right Answer

In a discussion in another forum, a debate arose over reality – is it a void or a metaphysical fullness. I thought an overview might be in order…

For those of you who may wonder who here is speaking the “truth” or has the “right answer”, it’s worth observing how consciousness evolves and with it, our perception of the world.

There is any number of different ways of outlining the process, plus individual ways of experiencing it. Each of us will also shift at various times and in various circumstances. It is also non-linear, so can jump around. But in a broad way, we can see:

- physical – what is solid is real, survival of the fittest, us vs. them.
- emotional – what I experience and believe is real. On the down side, this is the home of drama and victim thinking.
- intellectual – what I understand and deduce is real, strong sense of person and self control. Home of the ego.
- intuitive – what I feel is the foundation of what is perceived, metaphysical is real. Refined perception.
- transcendent – what is beyond perception is real and the world arises from That.

Transcendent experience itself has several stages:
- a blank space in meditation or similar, punctuated by a wave of joy.
- a growing sense of inner emptiness or void, an unbounded space into which all arises. This is accompanied by the sense of witness or observer.
- a growing sense of the emptiness as fullness, richness beyond description, divine. The emptiness is fullness.
- the collapse of perception and joining of experiencer and experienced in Unity or Oneness.

Some of the transcendent development arises from the silence moving forward into the experience. Refined perception of the intuitive stage, for example, is part of the vehicle of the revealing of divinity. This can occur before the unfolding emptiness, during the growth of fullness and/or after unity. With the first, the person will tend to skip over the emptiness into fullness. With the last, the experience of void may be extended with a flatter period.

As the intellect is the key to the unity ‘switch’, that too is absorbed in Self. Thus, we can see there is an inward stroke, progressing down the list, where we connect with source and become that, then an outward stroke where source moves forward to absorb the world. Although it doesn’t really absorb the world as the world already is that. It is simply often experienced that way.

Net result – there is a series of “right answers” or what is true for you at any given time. The key to real growth is not what someone tells you is truth but looking to what is true for you.

Then, do not hold too firmly to that discovered truth as it will evolve as you do. If you are flexible and open, the path will unfold before you. If you are fixed, you will tend to go in circles or be pushed.

And remember, its about the journey, about what is real for you now. It’s not about some conceptual goal.
Davidya

Moving

Moving home or work can have interesting effects. When I was younger and moved more often, I noticed things seemed to get better after a move. Some people study best places for a person using tools like biorhythms or astrology. I’ve also heard it said that the laws of nature are strongest for us in our place of birth. (of course, that depends on what we want strong in our life 

I recently spoke of the idea of Place and how you may feel about where you are in a very literal sense. How you are with what is includes where you are. I suspect improvement with change will often have more to do with psychology – how we feel about the change. We move towards what we want or away from what we don’t want. Naturally then, the experience will be of hope and betterment. It also gets us out of our ruts, obliges us to think about what we want and see the world more freshly. We get back to the basics of intention.

There is a deeper aspect of this that is good to understand, even if it is not yet our experience. We may have a habit of seeing ourselves as a separate person. As the ego falls away, we begin to experience an internal unity. As that moves forward into the experience, the sense of person decreases and the sense of Self in all things grows. Eventually, it becomes apparent that you are not this person in a body, you are everything. Literally. Not just as a sense of inclusive expansion. You are the table, the trees, and the sky. Touch it and you feel yourself touching and being touched. Some teachers describe the ‘cosmic body’, where the world is your body. Moving through the world is like shifting your attention from your fingers to your hand.

Notably, we also discover that we not only store stress and resistance in the body, but in our stuff. Some possessions bring us memories and joy or have a simple utilitarian function. But many of us have homes and storage lockers full of resistance – physical things we store our dramas in. It’s very simple to see this. Simply look at the object and see how it feels. Does it bring you joy? Is it neutral, having a utilitarian function like a broom? Or is there other stuff that comes up like pain, regret, fear, that sense of grip? Does it have a ‘just in case’ or ‘what if’ tone, though you’ve not used it in years?  That may be the mind’s excuse for a hidden resistance. The stuff in the back of the closet or basement can have some of the deepest festers.

This is why many people struggle with cleaning things out. Especially if they have a large house. Without an annual spring cleaning ritual, we see the rise of “clutter busters”. Many objects we keep for memories can be replaced with a photo. Remember – its the memory that brings you joy, not the object. If you do this gradually, you may find yourself downsizing enough that you can move to a smaller place that requires less work and money to support. Just remember – some people live happily in 400 square feet.

The late George Carlin put it well: “Your house is a pile of stuff with a cover on it” and “Your house is a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.”
See the rest of his monologue on Stuff

It makes the process of going through your stuff  a whole different adventure. Rather than a question of need, it becomes a spiritual exercise in  purification. When it’s done, we will have a home with space, surrounded by the things we love. Then it is easy to feel gratitude and energize that cooperation.

We can do the same thing when we go shopping. Mindful shopping, we might say. Ask yourself if you love it or is there just some craving or sense of need? Does it support your life and pursuit of love or does it burden you with further obligations? Everything you own requires a place to keep it, your time, and your money for upkeep. When you lighten the load, you gain far more than you release.

And remember, trash should be your last resort. Sell it, give it to charity, recycle it. When you release it to someone else, you release the resistance as well.

Knowing we are all things quite changes your sense of place, of stuff, and our relationship with the world. Do you think there would be issues of abuse, pollution, debt and poverty if a majority experienced the world this way?

It’s coming.
Davidya

PS – yes, I’m moving in a couple of days, currently surrounded by boxes.  But a lot fewer boxes than there used to be. Craigslist funded the move, charity profits, and love flows more freely. Back to packing…

Entitlement

There is a kind of disease that permeates western culture. With our up until recent  stretch of prosperity, the disease became almost unchecked. That disease is entitlement. A sense of deserving, simply because of who you are.

We see this in the unsustainable debt levels many people have taken on. In the expectation of ever greater profit at any expense. Marketing is full of this message. You deserve to have anything we want to sell you. We’re actually ruining the environment we need to support ourselves in this rush into meaningless consumption of products that themselves ruin our health. It is also deeply entrenched in new age and modern spiritual thinking such as Law of Attraction. If I wish it, I can have it. I deserve to be wealthy.

How do we deserve such prosperity when we leave a wake of destruction in our path? When we leave even our own unfortunate to fend for themselves on the uninhabitable streets? Such madness can only arise in the illusion of separateness.

While the basic principles are true, they have been co-opted by the ‘dark side’, by the mask of specialness. By a childish sense of “mine”. When we culture entitlement to the illusion, we are giving it strength, making it real. We are growing our shadow story about the world. This is not the path to awakening. It is being trapped in a childish pout.

Such ideas are the most dangerous on the path – the wolves in sheep’s clothing. Messages of happiness masking greed and envy. Messages of peace covering want and lack. The real question – who feels entitled? Who deserves all this crap at the expense of our children?

Some teachers teach abstinence to move away from such dangers. Others, like Jesus, taught humility. To a large extent, you can move past much of this simply by connecting to source. But there may be some need for a practice of mindfulness or presence to bring embedded ideas into awareness so they can be seen through. You may also find it beneficial to step a little out of the media barrage that cultures these needs, like TV.

It’s a funny thing. The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. But we don’t deserve it because we are it. We have never left the Garden of Eden, except in our minds. When we can surrender to what is, let go of this sense of “mine”, then the story will fall away and the peace that passeth understanding will be revealed.

It’s a startlingly big change in outlook. But it is a surprisingly small change to make. The veil of illusion is very thin. Peace and happiness are yours, but not the little yours. Perhaps put better, peace and happiness are ours.
Davidya

Place

I love where I live in the world. I’ve lived on the US and Canadian prairies and in western Europe, but I’ve always come back here. They affectionately call the area Cascadia. It’s a temperate rain forest, so although often drizzly and overcast, it is lush and green. Nature abounds in a city full of large parks. One can go boating in the morning and skiing in the afternoon on the mountains that overlook the city to the north.

The natural harbour is protected from the open Pacific by a large island. Between it and the city, the Straight is dotted with “gulf” islands, an area recently described as one of the 5 most sattvic places in the world. The city itself is often at the top of “most livable” lists.

And one of the things I like best, we have long early springs. The bulbs are coming up now. We should have the first spring flowers in a few days.

Do you love where you are? Your place in the world?
Davidya

Who is Awaking?

In a discussion on another forum, an interesting aspect arose that was worth touching on here. How different reality is when the world is awake.

I’ve touched on the basic points here many times. The world arises in consciousness, formed of intention. Everything is intended. This also means everything is conscious.

But these days, in what the Vedas call Kali Yuga, that conscious quality is largely asleep in the most expressed values. The world has a shadow and sleeps or dreams in a world of separation. As humans, we express this as the ego idea of being individuals. We live in a fractured dream reality of our story.

As many have described, we are now moving into a golden age, a period of Sat Yuga. This means that people are awakening. But not just people. The whole world. Remember, there is no me and you, just we, us. Everything is waking up. Some things that have been in a deep slumber are now dreaming and beginning to stir. People, cultures and the environment are purifying.

The awake world is the origin of ideas like “spirits” of objects – the spirit of the earth or a mountain. When there is enough awaking, what has been “solid” becomes less hard. The intelligence of objects becomes awake, then more expressed, more creative. Objects express their joy through form. Flowers are the smallest taste of that.

The world becomes quite literally alive, the entire landscape a self-expressive work of art. The music of the spheres, the song of nature. This is much more than poetic license. Everything offers its gifts in joy.

It points to the profundity of the awakening underway. It is not just people that are waking up but all of nature. Everything, as there are no “others”. The One awakens to Itself. Are you ready to celebrate?
Davidya

Energizing Cooperation

Over on Basic Skills, I touched on the process of intention. Getting clear on what you want to accomplish and proceed to results.

As I have discussed elsewhere here, what gives an intention energy is emotions. The feeling value. The deeper we can connect with feelings, the more energy it will have. Love is the purest, most powerful. Overflowing with love automatically engages everything. The universe is expressing through you so everything is supported.

This is why being OK with what is is so important. If we are not OK with what is, we cannot go to the next step and love what is. When we can love what is, we are energizing the power of the universe behind us. We are putting the universe on our side, or rather getting on track with the universe.

On the flip side, if we are fighting what is, we are fighting the power of the universe. We cannot win. It’s not even a contest. We are only fighting ourselves.

This leads us to the missing point in Basic Skills. We are not in this alone. We are intending of the universe, for the universe. Stepping into the flow of the universe means loving what is. In loving what is, we are blessing those laws of nature that have been working to support us. In complaining, we are crapping on their efforts. Think that’s validating? Impressed your team is still working with you?

You can personalize these laws of nature as devas or angels, or you can keep them as laws of nature. It doesn’t matter. What matters is attitude. If everything is consciousness, it’s all conscious. Field values that precede form are the domain of the laws of nature and feelings. So you can tune feelings to tune fields. Use your energy to support theirs.

The process remains the same, but it should be laid over an emotionally supportive tone. A tone of love, of gratitude, of blessing, or of thankfulness. However you best find to express your thanks for the support you receive.

If you feel your life has not been supported, ask yourself if you have been supportive of that which supports you? When you look more closely, you may be startled at the gifts you are receiving, some completely missed in our absorption in what we don’t have or our problems.

From that place of thanks, intend, allow their process, take whatever steps you need to take to support it, allow them to do their jobs. When its complete, offer them your heartfelt thanks.

Having been a person in the head for much of my life, I’ve tended to separate the mental intention and the emotional thanks. They belong together. And that can dramatically enhance the cooperation of the universe with your life. Not to mention your return to what is. And that is the greatest blessing you can offer.

Davidya

Filled with Love

“We are filled with love when we give it away, not when we receive it from others. This can profoundly free us from the search for love, as anything is a worthy object of our love. Especially when we realize that love is simply awareness and space, then we can freely give it to everything that appears in our experience. In this way, we are filled to overflowing with the sweet open presence of love.“

– Nirmala from an article “Loving through the Senses“, an excerpt of the ebook “Living from the Heart“

Basic Skills

It is remarkable to consider how poorly our culture supports living a healthy and happy life. It is full of things to enhance the ego drama, eat poorly, and suffer. Why have we built such a monster? Very simply, our culture is a reflection of those within it.

But really, it’s more a boogy man than a monster. It’s an illusory effect and has no real bearing on our happiness unless we engage it. More remarkable, the difference between living in hell and living in heaven is fairly small. As we change internally, the environment changes with us. The world is as you are.

While surrender may be the magic for spiritual progress, the world requires an additional step. If we surrender to the world we are surrendering to illusion. If we wait for the world to bring us our wishes, we will wait a long time.

The key trick is intention or focused attention. Everything you experience is intended. EVERYTHING. The wind, the blades of grass under your feet…  The world arises from consciousness. What causes it to arise? Intention. There is no mistake or accidents.

Now, intention can seem to arise in an number of ways.

We can intend something, consciously or not, with our attention, thoughts and feelings. Indeed, most people are constantly unintentionally intending by telling their stories over and over.  ‘He is always angry.’ ‘I keep getting sick.’ ‘I always have lousy bosses.’  And thus, we affirm our pain.

So often, we can find it hardest to get out of a rut because we have so many thwarting beliefs. We can also cancel an intention with “if” statements, like “if it doesn’t work out, then…”, thus giving our intention to something else. This is not to say you shouldn’t have a Plan B. Only that we not use it to cancel the primary intent.

Note that this is not about content, it’s about where your attention is. Content is consequence only by attention.  If we have a bad dream and let it go, it remains a bad dream. If we have a bad dream and hold to to it, invest in it, we can help it become real.

We can also experience past intentions, what some call karma or fate. Old intentions whose response finally rises to the surface. And we experience the intentions of others around us, what we call our culture and environment.

Making sense of that sea of intention is muddied by the idea we are separate. You are intending and I am intending and Aunt May is intending and the postman is…  More deeply, only cosmic existence is intending. Consciousness is one and all arises from the One. We are simply the vehicles of expression of intention.

The thought “I am intending” arises because we experience ourselves as intending. And it’s true. But we mistake this “I” for the personal “I” due to identification. Caught in the illusion of a me, we mis-credit the experience. This is the ironic part – by misunderstanding who intends, we misunderstand the process.

Our body-minds are like mirrors of consciousness. The question is then – how clean is your mirror? How well do you reflect the whole? Do you fight or resist what arises? Think you may be introducing some distortion to the flow of intention? The key question – are you suffering or are you happy all the time? Are you intending hell or heaven?

Of course, there is no blame in these statements. Blame is the ego mind making it wrong. Remember – there are no mistakes. It takes time for each of us to see through our stories and begin to make better vehicles. To step out of the drama and into the light.

Looking to our culture is clearly not the solution to our woes. One cannot solve a problem by fighting its effects. But if we understand what’s actually going on, we can work with rather than against it.

The process:
- a clear, uncluttered intention. The deeper you connect when you intend, the better.
I don’t mean identify, just experience. Identification holds it.

- allow it. Let it progress in whatever way it does. Get out of the way. Let it go.

- take whatever steps are required to keep it moving. If things come up, don’t invest in them as obstacles. Just see them as steps, even if unexpected. Act.

- allow it to complete.

For example, this month I’m moving. I decided on the area I wanted to be in, then the building. A nice place, central, with a unique history. But when it was time to move, there was no vacancies. No matter – I looked around the area to confirm the intention but did not invest in another place. Other places made it clear I had the right choice. I spoke with friends about it – especially someone I know who lives there. They got back to me with an unadvertised vacancy. I was the only applicant. No problems, just steps.

This is illustrated in another way by the second Narnia film, when Aslan asks Lucy why they didn’t come sooner. Rather than going to him (acting) they had waited for him to come to them (inertia). The better stories are full of wisdom. (laughs)

Davidya

[Addendum: the importance of the emotional energy you bring in Energizing Cooperation ]