Where?

Life flows
Where does the river flow?
we know where it’s going
Why do we always ask?
do we think we can control the river?
do we think we need to control the river?

Just let it flow
and just look
where you are now.

D

Sinking in a Dream

The Cosmic dream bubble broke, and I sank in the sea-heart. The little bubble of my perception sank in the Infinite. I bounded over creation’s dream waves; my bosom heaved in the sea; I breathed in the wind; I moved with the star motions; I watched the dream elements of multi-million glimmerings, multi-trillion light specks. I saw the atom rivers flow past me through the pores of the blue, and through the pores of my body, and of my life. I dreamt within a dream. I dreamt many dreams of life within this God-made dream. I dreamt sorrow; I dreamt joy; I dreamt health; I dreamt sickness; I dreamt birth and death; I dreamt matter and spirit; I dreamt larkspurs and robins; I dreamt light and gloom; I dreamt myself and I dreamt God and Soul. I dreamt the divisions of time; I dreamt of past, present and future. I dreamt space and dimension. I dreamt ignorance and knowledge. I dreamt good and evil. I dreamt relativity and unit.

I dreamt long and sighed at my nightmares, when the gentle touch of the omnipresent fingers of Divine Mother love awakened me.

The cosmic dream bubble broke; the body bubble, the mind bubble, the soul bubble, all broke.

My boat of dream bubble raced over the sea of boisterous change, blown by the storms of Wisdom. My boat of life was made of iron sheets of delusive experiences, riveted together by nails of attachment, self-love, life-love, and matter-love. The Mother-sent wisdom storm grew furious. The lashings of Mother wisdom fell fiercely on the rivets of selfishness and attachment. The iron sheets of my delusion creaked and fell apart. My dreamboat of ignorance was shattered piece by piece and I plunged like a plummet into the depth of Divine Mother’s Sea-heart. My dream bubble, bubble waves of creation vanished. I sank into the heart of Oneness.

My throat of dream life choked; my dream breath vanished. My dream life died with the Cosmic dream. Then, when touched by the deepest depth of my Divine Mother’s heart, I awoke, and my Mother said in Her sweet, solacing, chanting voice, “I asked you to play with beautiful dreams; you played with charming dreams for a time, but soon I found you playing with naughty dreams. Soon I found you broken and bleeding, bruised by your dream experiences; so, My child, I called you away from the playground of naughty dreams and woke you in the Smiles of My everlasting life.”

Mother said, “In songs and dreams of My love I sent you on earth to live and dream of Me. Live, dream, and feel Me in all and with all, and in My songs and dreams depart from the earth-dream. You will meet everything, and everyone in My songs and dreams, whence there is no parting.”
—- Yogananda

(more cool, this is not just nice poetry but literal experience)

What Happens?

What happens when we remember our pain
and tell a story of what went wrong?

What happens when we remember our joys
and smile at everyone we meet?

What happens when we remember who we are
and find that deep inner peace?

What happens when we remember where we come from
and overflow in love and joy?

What will that do to the world?

Can you remember?
D

The Story Tells a Story

If you’ve done any self-work to any depth, you’ve undoubtedly run into our story-telling nature. We love a good story. But sadly, we also like lousy stories, stories that bring us pain and sadness. People have different names for this inner story telling. Things like core beliefs, the shadow story, unforgiven hurts, basic fears, and so forth.

With inner work, we discover our lives are running largely on the basis of old unquestioned beliefs that inform our reactions and responses to life. And more, they define our choices and self-defeating behaviours.

Some of those stories are obvious to our perceptive friends because we tend to tell our stories to anyone who will listen. This helps us justify ourselves. But more importantly, this telling also makes it more true for us, more real. If we stop once in a while and listen to what’s coming out of our mouth, it can be surprising what we don’t even realize we believe.

This is not to say we shouldn’t tell our story or that our story is wrong – only that we should be aware of what stories we’re telling ourselves and others. Some may be fine. Others, less so. By our middle years, we can build a pretty big pile. How much does the pile stink? That’s where stuff like The Work and Sedona and mindfulness gets us into asking the truth of our beliefs.

Coming to terms with our unforgivenesses and fears can be profoundly healing. Life altering even. I’ve seen people overcome life-threatening diseases by healing some of their wounds. Some healers can suggest the nature of the wound simply by where the disease is manifesting. It’s not always easy to face your seeming demons but without that, they will haunt you.

For example, in The Barn Dance, Jimmy lives decades with the pain of having failed his wife. He spends years looking for a solution, not realizing the key issue is forgiving himself. Forgiving ourselves can be the most difficult of all. Much more than forgiving those we feel have wronged us. Yet profoundly easy if we are simply willing to openly see what we hold within.

In the depths of time, when the value of consciousness we’re able to reflect takes an apparent fall, it can be deeply disturbing to a psyche used to bathing in the light of wholeness. Many feel cut asunder and, like a young child misunderstanding their parents upset, blame in some way.

With the lower awareness, this unforgiveness becomes subconscious, creating secondary and tertiary levels of stories and beliefs to explain this shadow feeling. Perhaps we carry a deep unresolved anger that we point at our parents or society or ourselves. Or we carry a sense of blame or judgment. Or perhaps we carry a burden of shame or grief. These can be found to come back to that core wound of yore.

Such feelings play out in all sorts of stories of abandonment, unworthiness, or distrust that get layered into events in our lives. We point to events in our past as proof of the truth of our beliefs, not recognizing they only prove our pain.

As we go deep enough to find the core identity under the ego self, (post waking) we discover the framework of our core story. The core drivers of this life.

In one of lifes little ironies, at the bottom of our pain is a person and a story that defines who we are. And why we’re here. The project is not to end the story. It is to clear all the noise that has built up on top of it. Then we find the story of our dharma or purpose, the one that doesn’t  end until everything does.

We live in a story within a story within a story. When we get a better sense of this, we can play the game much more easily and stop stepping on our own toes. A dance is supposed to be fun, after all.
Davidya

Memory Continues

Last month I spoke of the subtler values of Memory, what is called Smriti in Sanskrit. We could say consciousness is remembering itself through us. Reality is structured in the core intelligence of being. But the vastness of this remembering is rather hard to comprehend. And although it’s all one thing, this remembering is as if layered.

Firstly, everything is being remembered in the eternal now, all at once. In every moment, everything has happened. All of the past, present and future is only now. This is not just events we might find in a newspaper, but everything experienced by every person everywhere in all times. Plus the experiences of every devata, animal, insect, plant and inanimate object that has ever been, anywhere. Every grain of sand in the universe. Every universe in creation. Every creation in Being. Right now.

This may perhaps begin to give you a sense of how vast we are as consciousness. As That, Tao, Brahman. This ‘all of everything’ is known by consciousness right now, both as an experience and as an alive memory. They are in essence the same thing.

At the same time, every point within consciousness is also experiencing itself. It’s like a recursive fractal of every point, going into itself in fine detail to know itself more fully. This happens both in scale and resolution. We call this our apparent individual lives, following an apparent timeline, unfolding within the totality of now.

So we see both a macro inclusivity and a micro ever-refining detailing that happens on multiple scales concurrently. These are not separate things but rather one process happening at all values.

We can also note both a size scale and a refinement (or resolution) scale that interpenetrate. We are primarily and habitually tuned to scales we normally interact with. With average perception we are unable to see much smaller size scales without aids like microscopes. But we are also unable to see (or measure) more refined scales, whatever the size, unless we also refine the process of perception.

In spite of the grand scale suggested by the Now above, there are various perspectives, including from modern physics, that suggest humans sit somewhere in the middle of the size scale. And towards the lower end of the refinement scale. For example, on the scale of Kalas, humans begin at 4 out of 16. Interestingly, Kala means time or attribute in Sanskrit. Both are qualities of the process of experience, that which defines our perception.

Models?
These clips don’t reflect reality itself but can give you a sense of the detailing mechanism. They are explorations in fractals, simple recursive formulae that have surprisingly organic qualities.

Mandelbulb:

Mandelbrot zoom:

(the edge of the black regions are the event horizon)

An interesting aside is that while creations and universes and people come and go, memory remains. And thus, we rise again in vast time scales beyond imagining. Super deja vu.
Davidya

The Barn Dance

Recently, my writing group had the opportunity to get pre-release copies of James Twyman’s upcoming book The Barn Dance. (September release date) I have mixed feelings about Twyman’s work. His film Moses Code was a decent next step from The Secret but last years The Proof turned out to be an over-hyped promotion for a course that had nothing to do with its supposed theme, oneness. He was taking turns founding a Franciscan Order, playing psychic and waving a Kabbalah around. Or at least his interpretation of the Kabbalah from 3 days research.

The Barn Dance surprised me. It’s presented and reads like a novel but he says that for him, it’s all true. I ended up reading it in one sitting. He tells the story of his failed marriage, his ex-wifes murder, and being drawn back to a remote cliff-side 3 1/2 years later, where he enters a kind of dream-time in a barn, “somewhere between heaven and earth.”

In a lot of these kinds of works there are glaring misunderstandings that can be quite misleading about the afterlife but this one sounds genuine to me. Certainly he and those he meets are interpreting their experiences in their own way. A few small things I wouldn’t consider the highest understanding but there’s nothing that troubled me.

The story only explores the edge of the immediate afterlife. It doesn’t touch on other lives or deeper background for the story we each tend to run with. But he does face his story head-on in a series of both beautiful and difficult experiences.

He briefly speaks of parallel realities. From my perspective, there is a field of possibilities which collapses to a single time-line once choice is made. Then there is no “alternate choices”. That said, time is relative. The Yog Vasishta, for example, illustrates how lives can occasionally be lived within lives. I suspect this is more the nature of the dream-time he experienced.

It was notable he was faced with a difficult choice but used the dream-time to seemingly choose both options, although he actually had only one choice and it had already been made years prior. What the circumstances really did was allow him to both learn a lesson or two and understand the choices he had made.

The story explains a lot about his life and drivers. And unexpectedly offered some profound insight into my own life. While his circumstances and the motivators were different, I shared some of the all to common conflicts between marriage and career. Not to mention how our purpose may sometimes seem at odds with the consequences of love. It also highlighted the great strength we need to make it all work, a strength that can sometimes fail us.

In some ways, the core of the books lesson explores some of the same things as Debbie Ford’s The Shadow Effect. But it comes to it in quite a different way. A different way of seeing what you’ve been unwilling to see that will ultimately allow you to deeply heal old wounds.

Overall I really enjoyed the book. While it may seem a little out there to some and, at times, heavy, it rings authentic and deeply personal. And I loved some of the lessons he got, like “you just have to let go” and “there is no death” and “love is forever.” The book will be available in about 3 months.
Davidya

Peace

“Peace is not something you wish for; it’s something you make, something you do, something you are, something you give away.”
– Robert Fulghum
Author of All I Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, now in a 15th anniversary edition and What on Earth Have I Done? plus others.
Resident of Pacific Northwest. And Greece. The advantage of life as a writer.

If you’ve not read him before, you can get the sense of his writing style on his web site.

Practice after Awakening

In reading the Yog Vasistha (slowly), I have come to the part where Rama has awakened and Vasistha is telling him the next steps. He does so by relating a story from a time he spent in the abode of Lord Shiva. Shiva goes by and they meet and have a discourse.

The Lord indicates “The self is not realized by any means other than meditation.”, an “external worship”. (worship could also be translated as practice) He then goes on to describe “internal worship of the self”. With Self realization, all actions become a perpetual meditation. “This is the supreme meditation.” “One should contemplate the Supreme Lord who is seated in the heart…”

From the perspective of states of consciousness, this is very much a culturing of God realization. Which, again, is not an experience but a becoming.

“Know that heart to be the abode of God.
Surrounded by nerves, it hangs down like a lotus bud.
At its end is a subtle nerve,
in which is established the Being, who is everything.
A great fire is at its center, which has
flames all around, spreading in all directions.
It is the first partaker, the ageless knower,
who digests and circulates food.
Above and below are its spreading flames.
It keeps its body hot from head to feet.
At its core lies a flame, tapering finely upwards,
like the awn of corn, yellow, bright and subtle,
flashing like a lightening in the heart of a dark cloud.
At the center of this flame is installed the Supreme Being.
He is Brahman. He is Siva. He is Indra.
He is the indestructible Supreme Being, the lord Himself.

– from the Taittariya Aranyaka III.13

Note the word “installed” in the 3rd to last line. When the divine value of the heart awakens, then the Supreme Being can be found there. Because of how this may be experienced, we may say it  arises or is installed. The earlier description includes the nadis and prana. (this is not just poetry)

Back to Shiva: “This inner intelligence should be worshiped with whatever comes unsought. Remaining firmly seated in the stream of life and it’s experiences after having bathed in self-knowledge, one should worship this inner intelligence with the materials of self realization.”

There is a key point in here. He goes on to mention “one should abandon what is lost and one should accept and receive what has been obtained without effort.” This is the same as “comes unsought.” These, it says, are the “materials of self realization.”

Shiva goes on to say: “That infinite consciousness alone is fit to be adored and worshiped.” That which is the “father of Brahma, Vishnu, Siva and others.” (forms of God)  “consider all of your experiences and expressions are the worship of the self.” He also mentions that worship of God in form is only for those who do not yet know the self. (this is God in form talking)

Larger Perspective

It should be noted here that we’re discussing a specific perspective or stage on the journey. Some of these sorts of things become whole movements or belief systems, suggested as The Way, rather than a stepping stone.

For example, with some experience of the witness and it’s sense of separation of Self and environment, there can be the tendency to reject the apparent Maya or illusion of the world. As I spoke in Innate vs Illusion, Maya is only illusion at one stage, contrary to typical understanding. Unless you keep in mind the state or perspective the speaker is coming from, and where that fits into the greater whole, it’s just another competing concept.

This is why I harp on having the larger perspective of the process. That there is no one “right answer” for all people. There is a process of human development. Without that understanding, people get stuck on intellectual positions and you get a dominant meme, such as is common in many “traditions”.

“I ask those who propound only the formless: Can any profit be derived from the unmanifest fire which is hidden in a piece of wood? Please show me any bread cooked by an unmanifest fire…

The formless is only Being. I would like to ask those people who meditate only on the formless, how do you meditate on the unmanifest? The mind can only concentrate* on an object of meditation, so how can one make the unmanifest an object of meditation? Concentration on the unmanifest is not possible… Formlessness is beyond all the trios, namely: meditation, meditator, and object of meditation… Only those who do not understand the principle of formlessness can talk about meditation [dhyana] on the formless…

Only when the Lord manifests himself can we say with full confidence that He must exist in unmanifest form. With the help of the manifest form, we have evidence of the unmanifest. Otherwise, how can anyone know the unmanifest?”

– Swami Brahamananda Saraswati, Shri Shankaracharya UpadeshAmrita kaNa 88 of 108

We can go on to say that true Unity does not dawn as long as there is some concept of world as other or separate. Unity starts with the end of other. As more and more is united in oneness, That is found to be the container of all this and infusing it all. It is not exclusive but rather fully inclusive.

What else would Oneness be but more than everything?
Davidya

*concentration I would normally translate as effortless focus. This is another meme that effort is required in meditation whereas Dhyana means continuous attention and Dharana effortless focus. I’ve found effortless mediation far more effective than common concentration practices. This is because effortlessness is the way of being. Note “obtained without effort” as quoted above, for example.

Change Control?

Last night, former US President Bill Clinton spoke in town. Evidently, he gave a wide-ranging talk on a number of global issues. On Haiti, his current project, he spoke in essence of the “teach a man to fish” model. “No matter how many people we put in school, how many sick kids we see in health clinics…within a matter of years it will be gone again unless we can build the capacity for them to live their own lives and not need us anymore.”

I agree fully that pouring aid into an area without building sufficiency just leads to the need for more. Even in my city, aid is poured into the rough part of town at a rate that would give all the disadvantaged a good income. Yet they see little of it directly. (yes, some are not capable of managing their own lives, but that’s another discussion)

More interesting was this quote: “You have millions of people in our country and all around the world just screaming for change to stop so the ground doesn’t move under their feet everyday and they can get back to some basic level of control.”

This is a whole different message that’s not being groked yet, I suspect even by Mr. Clinton. Change is the nature of life. And right now, change is accelerating, partly to shake us loose from what we’ve been resisting. As long as we fight that change, we’ll be struggling to hold on and suffering. When we learn to go with the flow, the ride gets much smoother. We begin to find happiness with what is.

We discover life is not about control. It’s about moving with the flow. For some reason, the film Contact comes to mind. In the movie, they change the capsules plans to add in a secure seat for the pilot. After being heavily shaken in the seat, she undoes her harness and floats freely. In the end, her only injury is from the added seat broken loose.

Smile. Life is a lot of fun if you let it be. 
Davidya

Lost Purpose

Spiritual writers often talk a lot about subjects like ego identification and the suffering that results from it. We may get the sense that ego is bad, but this is a misunderstanding of its role in evolution.

In essence, there is a process of fullness collapsing into a point, then that point opening up back into fullness again. This is how fullness comes to know itself in every detail.

In our own personal growth, we experience this collapsing into a point as the development of individuality. A clearly defined sense of local self. In the fullness of that we find what Maslow called Self Actualization. However, in our culture we’ve tended to encourage a less mature form of individual where the sense of being separate is dominant. This personal alienation leads to individual suffering. But it is also writ large on the world stage.

Business is rightly a means to offer a product or service for the mutual benefit of both company and clients. It creates a good for the community and, through an exchange of value, we produce a betterment. A flow of good called an economy. A true economy is essentially an energetic system that mirrors life itself.

A false economy on the other hand is one where there is not a mutual exchange of value. For example, marketing may create demand for a product that has no real value or may even be detrimental. Cigarettes would be one. Or, through the manipulation of markets, profits are produced without adding anything to the community. This is called false wealth as it is actually destructive to the economy. Profits are made at the expense of others, either directly or through debasing of value and markets. The stock market, for example, has become a charade of card tricks designed to produce false wealth. Banks, who task it is to manage wealth, become some of the greatest debasers, betting against their own customers.

When a business becomes an entity solely for generating profit, it looses sight of its function in society and becomes an amoral cancer. As we discussed over on 4 levels of Purpose, profit and labour must follow purpose, not the other way around. It is only through this ego sense of alienated separation that anyone would consider a business entity separate from the society in which it functions. When purpose is so debased, “It’s just business” becomes an an excuse for madness, a justification for any senselessness.

In our society, we give a corporation the rights of a person, then often structure the business to be anti-person. Now certainly, the business is “customer aware” for the purpose of generating profit. But only in the sense that it can convince people to consume.

One just has to watch a little TV to see a parade of advertising designed to convince people they need things that serve no purpose other than producing profit and waste. This is so prevalent that most people are oblivious to it. It’s become “normal” to destroy one’s body, home, environment, and financial well-being. The Hidden Influence of Social Networks spoke of some of the mechanisms of that. It becomes normal to eat badly, fill your home with poisons, waste vast quantities of resources while expecting them to vanish, pollute your community, and go into unsustainable debt to support it all. This is why some speak of our cultures madness. Its obvious if you stop and take a look. And scary for those that do, seeing they live a life of “quiet desperation.”

This also spills over into governments. Because they have to be reelected at close intervals, they have to try to quickly meet the vested interests of populations that will support them. Even “conservative” governments typically spend far more than they have. Long term planning in the greater good serves no profit so the process becomes completely debased. Politics too becomes a bizarre stage ritual of meaningless posturing over artificial positions, dancing to a media people are leaving in droves. Bureaucrats proliferate, seeking to uphold the rules at whatever the cost to the community. And then of course there are the amoral “business interests” with money to spend. Government gradually destroys the community they were tasked to support.

Contrary to the message the ego might offer, we are not alone in this. There is no “every man for himself.” We are in this together. What you do to another, you do to yourself. If this is not apparent to you, you have forgotten who you are. One only has to look at a little longer stretch of time to see the folly of our society as it is now behaving. History repeats itself. If you keep making the same mistakes, you can’t expect the results to change.

Money is energy, the ability to do work. When we place these means above or ahead of our purpose, we lose the whole point of why we’re here.

It’s like we’re collecting hammers without building a house.

Ask the average person to tell you about themselves. They will give you their name, work role, perhaps hobbies. Now ask them what their purpose is. Any entity that focuses on the means rather than its reason for being is bound to lose its way. Without a compass, we chart a path to hell.

We have created a culture that teaches the value of meaninglessness, yet have the gall to call it the “pursuit of happiness”. It is actually the pursuit of suffering. Without purpose, we, and the government trying to please us, behave like children in their terrible twos. Spending money we don’t have, borrowed from agencies wishing to enslave us financially, to run an economy without value. This is a prison of our folly.

It is only the belief that people can’t make a difference that keeps the parade going. Yet we vote every time we pull out our wallet. Businesses play close attention to this. It’s not that hard. It’s just paying attention. What am I feeding with my attention? What am I feeding with my money? What am I feeding my body? My friends and family? My society? My landfill?

I am perhaps talking to the converted. But this was the muse that arose a couple of days ago. And notably, similar points came up in other quarters. So here it is. Your choice.
Davidya