Terence McKenna - A New Kind of Time

“We are all, including myself, heavily freighted with linguistic momentum. . .the power of our own metaphors to carry us past the opportunity to listen to what other people are saying. What we are dreaming of is a common language. A linguistic transformation that is not dependent on culturally sanctioned dictionaries, but is in the bones, in the sinews, in the synapses, so that the ambiguity which attends all discussions of reality, will be purged. This is the essence of falling in love, one definition of which is nothing more than lifting the veils of misconception between two entities and still being able to move forward toward some kind of union. We have moved so far from an awareness of the feminine portion of our psyche, that now the thing dearest to us and closest to us must present itself in consciousness under the guise of an extraterrestrial or inter-dimensional invader. It’s a comment on the alienation of our era and the way this schism can be breached, the way this psychic wound can be healed, and a kind of species-wide individuality emerge, is through taking conscious control of the evolution of language. This means paying a great deal of more attention to what we say to each other, to linguistic intent. . .

“The UFO is an expression of our longing for wholeness.

“Communication, which we take astonishingly for granted, is actually the great frontier of our spiritual becoming. . .”

And so much, much more.

What Do You Want?

TRUE ABUNDANCE

You don't really want what you think you want
You only want your wanting to end
To no longer want for anything
To be existentially full and complete

But isn't that just another want?
Perhaps the biggest want of all?

Do you really want your way out of wants?
What do you really want?

"Want" actually means "lack"
So now the question changes:
What do you really LACK?
Do you really lack anything in this moment?

Thought says YES
Thought lists all the things that are missing
Thought advises that certain objects, people, experiences would complete this moment
Thought is always a seeker
It is always comparing

Thought says:
If you get what you want
The lack will disappear permanently
And this moment will be completed

Get what you want!
No more lack!
Do you see the trick here?
A mechanism perfectly designed to keep you away from what you really want

What is true abundance?

It's not about getting what you want
It's not about filling a lack
It's about realising that the present moment never lacks anything
It's already full to the brim with sights and sounds and smells
With thoughts and feelings
With colours and shapes beyond imagination

A thought or feeling of lack
A sense of 'something missing'
Is actually part of this moment's completeness
Not a threat to it
Part of the richness of Now
Not an enemy
A welcome visitor in the vast open space that you are
An old friend, come for tea

Space lacks nothing
For it is full with everything
Pregnant with possibility
Rich with potential

The mind confuses peace with 'absence'
Space with 'emptiness'
And unlimited capacity with 'lack'
And the game is on
The search for opposites
The longing for goals

You don't really want what you think you want
And that's why getting what you want
Doesn't satisfy 'you' for long

Who you really are does not 'want'
It has never heard of 'lack'
It is already satisfied with this moment
For it is this moment
Exactly as it is

This is true abundance:
Remembering who you really are
Prior to time and change

These are the unparalleled riches of the universe:
A breath
The simple feeling of being alive

Getting what you thought you wanted
Acquiring all the material and spiritual riches of the universe
Doesn't even come close

This moment is a strange and unexpected jackpot

And when nothing belongs to you
Everything is yours 

A SORRY AWAKENING

Many years ago
When I believed I was "enlightened" and "beyond ego"
(How ironic!)
I had a mantra:
"Never Say Sorry. Never Apologise".

I secretly believed that I was perfect
Beyond humanity
Beyond reproach
And there was "nobody here"
who ever needed to apologise for anything
(since everything was "perfect", of course).

If anybody ever had a problem with me
If anybody was upset with something I'd said or done
It must have been their projection
Their ego
Their un-enlightenment
Their ignorance
Their suffering
That's what I believed, anyway
(I also believed that I had no more beliefs).

I was attracted to "radical" spiritual teachers
Who acted unkindly
And never apologised.
How awakened they seemed!
How cool and detached!
How unaffected by life!
How radical!

But when did saying sorry
And making amends
And listening deeply to the one in front of you
And truly meeting in humility
Ever become the Original Sin of enlightenment?
When did awakening lose its humanity?
When did enlightenment become an excuse for a raging ego?

Back then, I held 'others' at a distance
With my lack of humility and refusal to engage
And then I claimed that there were "no others"
Like a well-trained Advaitically-correct robot.
Perfectly denying the perfectly imperfect human heart.
A disconnected Oneness.
A recognition with no love.
A fire without warmth.

I'm sorry.

Jeff Foster - Life Without A Centre

The Elephant in the Living Room Is Standing On My Foot

by Robert Cinque
Contributor

Question:  What is your relationship to Life?  How do you feel about being here?  Do you trust it, or are you suspicious, bitter, and withdrawn?

In my casual ego mind, I am emotionally withdrawn, absent, shut down, bewildered, disengaged, and confused.  I endlessly complain about my plight in this world and am ungrateful.  The ugly truth is that I routinely default on myself and others and on Life itself.  Life doesn’t betray me, I betray it.  When I entertain thoughts of betrayal and abandonment, I rape Life, then blame the bitch.  Life gets raped and blamed for it.

By now, I’m choking to death, but by my own hand.

This is important to recognize because, if it’s my hand, then I can remove it myself, don’t need anything or anyone to do it for me.

This is the first Office of Authentic Spiritual Practice: Recognition of and responsibility for the emotional withdrawal from Life and Love.

The Second Office is when I sit down and shut the Fuck up in the Face of the Cosmic Enormity of Life, and recognize Its Innocent, Fierce, Infinite, egoless Nature, my truest self.  I stop disassociating emotionally into my fantasies of separateness from this Profound Wonder and vomit out all the repression, the avoidance, the trauma of real and imagined disease and get into Bed with this Great Lover.

The Brilliant, Unbroken, seamless Presence of Life circulating through all creation, the Current that oscillates between the cycles of birth and death, through infinite stretches of fathomless space, that one, that Very One, is the Only Existing Reality and I am completely, always, already inherently one with It, just like a whirlpool in a River. It has always been this way.

There is only One Life living all things and It became me and you.  When we meet on that level, big things happen, because ego, the dramatization of betrayal and abandonment has been made obsolete by Noticing and Being Intimate with the One who shows up as Two. This produces emotional and spiritual intimacy between us because we are standing on what is Real.

When the whirlpool sees the River and its place in it, it swoons and falls intoxicated into bed like a lover, ready, willing, able, open, fully engaged, deeply pleasurized, intensely passionate.

Now, you are aware of the Elephant on your foot.  It hurts.  God becomes man, even poor little you and me, a painful and bloody affair. The infinite Life consents to be you and me and everything else, fully surrendered to us all, and I miss it.  The Word becomes flesh, the infinity of Life fractalizes into mortal human beings who are all going to die, and I hide my face even though I am obligated to somehow love and trust in the face of this great contradiction.  We were born with the impulse to love, and everyone we love is going to disappear.  Does this make sense?  Does it produce trust or doubt in you?

Authentic spiritual practice, true religion, begins with this:  Recognizing my emotional recoil from the Incandescent Event of Existence and overcoming it by being responsible for it.

I thereby stand before it, not as it.

Spiritual practice has exactly nothing to do with beliefs, it has everything to do with the moral obligation to face the truth, to face Reality, to tell the truth about my lies, to own my own refusal to be that which I so obviously am:  the full bodied, red blooded incarnation of Infinite Life, in spite of my mortality and all my many faults and shortcomings.

This is an Ordeal, coming to terms with the simultaneity of my infinite and mortal nature.  It’s an impossible, contradictory situation, but here I am anyway.  When I make friends with it and stop making it into a problem, my eyesight clears up, the Obvious is now Noticed, this is simply the Way God Is.  Coming to terms with this involves staring into the Paradox long enough for the light and heat to burn through the rational and metaphysical assumptions I constantly plaster onto Life, ideas like “consciousness comes from neurons firing in the brain” (scientific materialism) and “Original Sin separates Man from God” (religious psychosis)

These completely unfounded and theoretical assumptions  reduce Life to the level of a concentration camp.

We are not isolated individuals, we share a dynamic unity with literally everything. Scientism, the religion of science, as well as religious fundamentalism are maps masquerading as this Territory of the Heart.  It doesn’t matter if the whole world believes it, belief has never changed the truth, not once.

Ego ideas about life are just not equivalents to Life Itself.  No map ever could be equal to the territory it describes.  The Radiant Core of Conscious Light, Existence Itself, the Infinitely Intense Current of the Heart, is the fundamental Nature of Reality.

When human culture is based on the Recognition and Appreciation and Exploration of this Wonder, this Impossible Treasure buried in the Field, when we as individuals and nations overcome our recoil, our lack of confidence in Life, in Actual God, we will return to the disposition of the Radiant Core and humanity will become the birthplace of Real Life, not materialistic, industrialized consumerism and disaster capitalism, not fundamentalism and fascism.  Tyrants will be laughed off the planet, having no exploitable hosts to dominate. Priests will go broke for lack of work.  The searing Obviousness of Utter Unity with all Life will overwhelm the petty differences within the human family and profound gratitude for and empathy with all others will be the dominant social meme planet wide.

This will come about when Reality is met on it’s own terms and is no longer held hostage in the dungeons of ego mind.   That will be accomplished when we have had quite enough of self strangulation, capitulation to lies, collusion with saboteurs, empowerment of tyrants, belief in false gods and completely wake up to the liberating Facts of Life:  Freedom and Light and Happiness is our very nature, now.  We share the nature of That which originated us, which is Free, Self Existing, and Radiant, Intelligent Light. We are not orphans born in sin.  We are inherently blissful incarnations of love and truth (Reality) radiant fractals of eternal Light, now as always. This is the demonstrable Truth, is not a belief, an idea.  It’s Real.  See for yourself.

This is cause for great celebration and will one day be the basis of human culture.  The Recognition of the Free, Ecstatic nature of Life and our inherent unity with It will unleash the most powerful forces ever seen on planet Earth.  When we identify What is fundamentally True and live in alignment with It, everything else falls into place.

Responsibility for Love, for Life, for What is True is the only realistic way to live.  Conventional religious and scientific beliefs are like junk food, it looks good, but has no real nutritional value.

Only Truth and Love can provide Light and Life. Truth is Real, is not an opinion.  If Truth is an ocean,  belief is a ripple on its surface.

Belief systems are virtual facsimiles of this Reality, canned versions of fresh food.

Why settle for a virtual reality when you can have the Real Thing?

+++

ZenGardner.com

Confronting the Matrix - Synchronicity Wins

MAX IGAN

The Real You - Alan Watts

“When you’re ready to wake up, you’re going to wake up, and if you’re not ready you’re going to stay pretending that you’re just a ‘poor little me.’ And since you’re all here and engaged in this sort of inquiry and listening to this sort of lecture, I assume you’re all in the process of waking up. Or else you’re teasing yourselves with some kind of flirtation with waking up which you’re not serious about. But I assume that maybe you are not serious, but sincere – that you are ready to wake up.

So then, when you’re in the way of waking up, and finding out who you really are, what you do is what the whole universe is doing at the place you call here and now. You are something that the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing… The real you is not a puppet which life pushes around; the real, deep down you is the whole universe.” 

– Alan Watts

Symptoms of Inner Peace

by Saskia Davis
©1984

Be on the lookout for symptoms of inner peace. The hearts of a great many have already been exposed to inner peace and it is possible that people everywhere could come down with it in epidemic proportions. This could pose a serious threat to what has, up to now, been a fairly stable condition of conflict in the world.

Some signs and symptoms of inner peace:

· A tendency to think and act spontaneously rather than on fears based on past experiences.

· An unmistakable ability to enjoy each moment.

· A loss of interest in judging other people.

· A loss of interest in judging self.

· A loss of interest in interpreting the actions of others.

· A loss of interest in conflict.

· A loss of the ability to worry. (This is a very serious symptom.)

· Frequent, overwhelming episodes of appreciation.

· Contented feelings of connectedness with others and nature.

· Frequent attacks of smiling.

· An increasing tendency to let things happen rather than (try to) make them happen.

· An increased susceptibility to the love extended by others as well as the uncontrollable urge to extend it.

WARNING:

If you have some or all of the above symptoms, please be advised that your condition of inner peace may be so far advanced as to not be curable. If you are exposed to anyone exhibiting any of these symptoms, remain exposed only at your own risk.

 www.symptomsofinnerpeace.net 

Manu Aluli Meyer on Epistemology - Aloha is Knowing

All It Takes is Ten Mindful Minutes - Andy Puddicombe

You Are Consciousness - A Close Encounter With "Self"

Love Always, Suzen

Wei Wu Wei - Bits and Pieces

From 'Fingers Pointing Towards The Moon':

It is less what one is that should matter, than what one is not.

* * *

The qualities we possess should never be a matter for satisfaction, but the qualities we have discarded.

* * *

It is not for us to search but to remain still, to achieve Immobility not Action.

* * *

There is no becoming. ALL IS.

* * *

The Saint is a man who disciplines his ego. The Sage is a man who rids himself of his ego.

* * *

It is only the artificial ego that suffers. The man who has transcended his false 'me' no longer identifies with his suffering.

* * *

We ourselves are not an illusory part of Reality; rather are we Reality itself illusorily conceived.

* * *

Are we not wasps who spend all day in a fruitless attempt to traverse a window-pane - while the other half of the window is wide open?

* * *

Detachment is a state, it is not a totalisation of achieved indifferences.

* * *

The notion that human life has greater value than any other form of life is both unjustifiable and arrogant.

* * *

Wise men don't judge: they seek to understand.

* * *

How many of the ways (disciplines, exercises, practices) recommended as helpful, or even necessary, for the attainment of Satori are not in fact consequences of that state erroneously suggested as means?

* * *

There seem to two kinds of searchers: those who seek to make their ego something other than it is, i.e. holy, happy, unselfish (as though you could make a fish unfish), and those who understand that all such attempts are just gesticulation and play-acting, that there is only one thing that can be done, which is to disidentify themselves with the ego, by realising its unreality, and by becoming aware of their eternal identity with pure being.

* * * * *

From 'Why Lazarus Laughed':

Living should be perpetual and universal benediction.

* * *

Doctrines, scriptures, sutras, essays, are not to be regarded as systems to be followed. They merely contribute to understanding. They should be for us a source of stimulation, and nothing more... Adopted, rather than used as a stimulus, they are a hindrance.

* * *

Of the many earnest, and how earnest, people we may observe reading, attending lectures, studying and practising disciplines, devoting their energies to the attainment of a liberation which is by definition unattainable, how many are not striving via the ego-concept which is itself the only barrier between what they think they are and that which they wish to become but always have been and always will be?

* * *

Play your part in the comedy, but don't identify yourself with your role!

* * *

On the phenomenal plane we seek pleasure and the avoidance of pain. On the noumenal plane we know the absence of both - which is Bliss.

* * *

When you give a shilling to a beggar
- do you realise that you are giving it to yourself?

When you help a lame dog over a stile
- do you realise that you yourself are being helped?

When you kick a man when he is down
- do you realise that you are kicking yourself?

Give him another kick - if you deserve it!

* * *

Reality alone exists - and that we are. All the rest is only a dream, a dream of the One Mind, which is our mind without the 'our'. Is it so hard to accept? Is it so difficult to assimilate and to live?

* * *

Even the intellectual understanding of the inexistence of our 'selves' is a rare and bitter attainment which few even attempt. And that is only the elimination round which qualifies us for access to Reality... Intellectual understanding should be not indispensable to a 'simple' mind, but, with our conditioning, it would seem to be an almost inevitable preliminary.

* * *

Past and Future are a duality of which Present is the reality. The now-moment alone is eternal and real.

* * *

Spontaneity is being present in the present.

Spontaneity by-passes the processes of the conceptual (aspect of) mind.

Reintegration with Nature, which we are, is the recovery of spontaneity.

* * *

What we know as 'life'
is the analytical realisation
in the seriality of time
of our eternal reality.

* * *

We have only to eliminate the ego-notion by succeeding in the difficult task of understanding that it does not exist except as a notion.

http://www.weiwuwei.8k.com/bits.html