female rapture

"Let yourself expand

Beyond the backbone of the mind.

      ...

You are the needle

holding the thread of eternity.

    ...

Together we worship 

Everything that cannot be owned."

Mary Loehr

Hidden Addictions

I was having an argument with my husband today that we'd already had a thousand times before. The same argument. I just couldn't stop spinning out all the reasons I was right, couldn't stop trying to convince him of the validity of my point of view.

Then it hit me: I am addicted to being unloved. Or, more accurately, I am addicted to the story of being unloved. I am addicted to the story of being separate. I am addicted to being right. The addiction to being right is also the addiction to the peculiar satisfaction of being wronged. I am addicted to the story-of-me...drunk on it (without a drop of alcohol).

Way back when I got this notion of being unwanted. The story of lack, the story of not being enough, had been bought into long before I got married.

Now the template is there. My husband has to somehow fit into the story of "Colleen is unloved. Colleen is a unfairly treated."

The deck is stacked and without even realizing it, I am bound and determined for him to play his role of proving the continuing saga of "Colleen the Unloved."

Wow- what a strange addiction. The addiction to suffering. How could I have been so blind to this drama playing itself out again and again in my life with a changing cast of characters? How could I have been so hoodwinked?

And separation seemed so obvious, but is it? Sun, space, air, tree are all separate words; but are they separate things? The sun is in the tree. The air is in the space. Nothing is separate. Separation is a word-created, mind-created mirage. Everything is connected to everything. There is one thing (no-thing) and we are all it appearing with infinite variety.

Seeing my addiction to suffering, my addiction to being separate and unloved, acts as a lever lifting me out of the story.

With enormous joy, the mind in this instant is empty.

I apologized to Greg for type-casting him in the crazy drama of my stories. He accepted my apology and forgave me. The eye contact between us was as clear as the sky. Greg and Jack are warming up for Jack's baseball practice this afternoon, and I'm settling in to enjoy a bit of doing nothing. Sending all love to my friends known and unknown through this medium of cyberspace.

"Touch that in you which does not need to be satisfied by the world of form."  Eckhart Tolle

Realizing our shared divine nature, that which underlies all experience, is what we're here for.

There is one argument: insufficient love. There is one resolution: recognition of the reality of abundance underlying all the stories of lack.
~

Guilt

I notice that there is a strangle-hold of guilt on every cell in my body and it has been there for decades. Unnoticed. Wow. What is constant becomes invisible and completely unnoticed.

It's a nameless, constant guilt, and it has been choking me for a long time.

And what am I guilty of?

One thing only. I'm guilty of not doing all the things I think I should do.

When I wash the dishes I'm guilty of wasting water by letting the tap run. When I drive through McDonald's I'm guilty of destroying the environment and my body. The drip of guilt in the veins is continuous.

I try to out run it, to throw off the dreadful weight of guilt in a thousand ways every day. I donate to charity. I pay the fine for my transgressions by punishing myself with an internal barrage of self-criticism. I meditate, I pray, I read, I try to find some refuge from the guilt, I rest in the purity of open awareness. I clean the house, hug the children, give undivided, silent, loving attention to the people I work with, look my husband in the eyes and tell him he is the best man I have ever known. I scurry frantically from one good act to the next all day long in an effort to stamp out the feelings of guilt, as if I were stamping out a fire in the house.

Still, the guilt hunts me, it finds me like predator finds prey.

I'm telling you this because I see this circle of running from guilt  has been the substance of my life as seen from the point of view of the mind.

Guilt is a mind-created fiction and it drives people nuts, me included. "Might is right" says guilt as it uses whatever tactics of coercion it can to manipulate the body towards the idealized behavior.

Guilt is supposed to be the inner police man that prevents wrong acts. Yet maybe it is the fuel that propels acts of destruction.

I've been running from guilt all my life and now I am looking at it directly. In this looking it disappears.

~

Sound and Light

Years ago I came across two sentences and they have never left me:

"The spiritual journey," says Thomas Keating, "is not a career or success story. It is a series of  humiliations of the false self that becomes more and more profound."

The world stood on its head.  For decades I had been seeking accumulation and self-enhancement when in fact all along the deeper longing was for the very opposite: diminution of that heavy burden of an imaginary ego-self .



This morning I was watching a video of Dr.Vijai Shankar  in which he asks, "What is thought?"

               I paused to consider this.

Thought is a word, he observes.

And what is a word?

               Again, I stopped to wonder what a word actually is.

A word is a sound.

              Thought is essentially a sound vibration, whether it is uttered out loud or not.

Mind is thought.

Thought is sound.

Mind is sound.  It is a vibration, a pattern, an appearance.


There is sound (mind) and light (awareness).

There is sound and light, there is mind and awareness: these are the two indivisible dimensions or aspects of reality.

Sound is form, light is formless, and they are one.

There is sound and the light of consciousness that is aware of sound. 

Sound and light occupy the same space and are inseparable.


For much of my life attention has been circumscribed to the thought-trance, hypnotized by the sound of the mind.

Yet the light bathes everything and it has always been free.

This light feels like home, and it does not make a sound.  The light loves sound without needing to make a single sound itself.


~
Gratitude to Thomas Keating, quote is from his book
http://www.contemplativeoutreach.org/site/PageServer
Gratitude to Dr. Vijai Shankar
http://www.nevernothere.com/dr-vijai-shankar
Gratitude for photo: http://www.coosacreek.org/way/?m=200910

The thermodynamics of attention

I am in a dark cave holding a flashlight.  The beam of the flashlight is the circumference of my reality.

What moves the beam of attention?  What are the thermodynamics of the flow of conscious awareness?

"Most people give their attention to what they don't like.  Put your attention on what you love."  (Adyashanti)

Recently I read an essay by David Foster Wallace called This Is Water that keeps coming back to mind.  I had never heard of Wallace, but here is a one sentence description of him (written by David Lipsky):

"He published a thousand-page novel, received the only award you get in the nation for being a genius, wrote essays providing the best feel anywhere of what it means to be alive now, accepted a special chair to teach writing at a college in California, married, published another book, and hanged himself at age forty-six."*

Explaining his struggle with depression, at one point Wallace said, "I think I had lived an incredibly American life. That, 'Boy, if I could just achieve X and Y and Z, everything would be OK.' "

The essay by David Foster Wallace was the commencement speech he gave at Kenyon College in Ohio in 2005, three years before his suicide in 2008.  It's one of the most lucid, honest, and penetrating essays I have ever read. One reviewer said that the essay is "like six Eckhart Tolle books rolled into one."

Here are some excerpts from Wallace's essay (with slight paraphrase).

"There is a blind certainty, a closed-mindedness that's like an imprisonment so complete that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up."

 "A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded."

 "It is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your head."

"But it is possible to be conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to...If you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.  Think of the old cliche about the mind being 'an excellent servant but a terrible master.' "

"I submit that the real value of education is supposed to be about:  How to keep from going through life a slave to your head."

"Our own present culture has yielded the freedom to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation."

"But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying.  The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness."

"The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the 'rat race'- the constant, gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing."

"Real value has everything to do with simple awareness- awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us."

Wallace describes a routine trip to the grocery store to illustrate in concrete terms what he is talking about.

Freedom of attention.  This makes me wonder about the thermodynamics of attention.  Thermodynamics is about the flow of energy, and attention is a kind of energy, for which we have not yet discerned the underlying dynamics.

What are the thermodynamics of attention?  Is there a magnetic pull toward clarity?  An attractive force towards truth?  A gravitational tug of ego?  An electromagnetic force field of love?  More and more there is a noticing of the flow of attention- what captivates it- what frees it. What does it mean for awareness to be aware of its own presence?  Life becomes an adventure in attention, as David Foster Wallace suggests.



(David Foster Wallace's commencement speech is highly recommended and can be read at this link:
http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/david-foster-wallace-in-his-own-words)

(* quote about Wallace is from  Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky, p. xv and p. 66)

(photo is from: http://zombiestories.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/light-beam.jpg)

~

Pointers point

Pointers

point

attention

out of the mind

into free fall.

Pointers are a very different use of language from the normal usage.

Pointers point outside of thought, not further into it.

Pointers are words that lead to freedom from words. 

A pointer that I have found to be very helpful is the question:  Where is my attention right now?

The capacity to "see" the mind and notice what it is attending to is an astounding capacity that tends to be underused.  When this question/pointer arises ( "Where is my attention right now?") and I'm honest with myself, the answer is often:  My attention is fixated primarily on the thoughts in my head.  My attention is on thoughts of me-and-my-life and on thoughts of me-and-what-will-happen-to-me. My attention is lost in ruminations about past and future.

Surprisingly, it can be a joy to see this stuckness of attention on the "me".  Watching the mind-shows called "past and future" and "me"  is so much better than being in them. It becomes increasingly obvious that attention, through conditioning and habit, tends to gravitate again and again back to past and future thoughts about this image called "me".  Through this gravitational pull of habit, attention repeatedly becomes lost in the trance of thought.  It's so freeing just to see this dynamic of attention as it occurs!

Pointers break the trance.

They redirect attention.

Another pointer is the question:  What gives rise to the thought 'I am' ?

Resting in this question, "What gives rise to the thought 'I am' ?"... can take awareness into a felt sense of the aliveness that gives rise to the thought 'I am.' 

Both Bob Adamson and Eckhart Tolle, and many others, have said-  let the pointer do its job.  Let the pointer take awareness into the silence.

Nisargadatta had one pointer from his teacher and he spent every waking moment with this pointer for three years, and the shackle of the mind fell off.

Bob Adamson has said that staying with one single pointer is all that is needed to fully realize freedom.  There are many powerful pointers, he gave one example of such a pointer:

What is wrong with this moment

unless you think about it?

This is also the title of Bob's first book.  Every time I ask the question, "What's wrong with right now?" and pause...the mind-bubble pops.  Every time I ask the question, "What's wrong with right now?" and pause...there is the quiet shock of  THIS-ness, where absolutely nothing is wrong. Awareness jumps off the diving board from mind to no-mind.  Awareness leaps from the finger pointing at the moon to the moon itself. Awareness notices what's closer than any word or thought.

Today there is a wealth and explosion of beautiful pointers, like a huge flock of magnificent birds, flying across the internet and in many books.  I am so grateful!  My intention is to go deeply into a small number of pointers, such as the ones mentioned in this post, and to let them clear the mental suffering as it arises.  Whenever any suffering is undone, the burden is less for all.

Thank you to all my friends on the blogosphere who have shared liberating pointers.  The pointer is similar to  a koan or paradox that bursts the boundaries of the mind. 

If you have some favorite pointers, please feel free to share them in a comment.

There are so many great blogs out there, and I will mention one in this context because nearly every post is titled "Pointers." If you haven't had the pleasure of checking out "Radiance of Being" (Rodney Stevens), you may want to click on this link:

http://radianceofbeing.blogspot.com/

~

Awareness doesn't say a thing.

Every day I wake up in the middle of the same old mind-clutter:  should do this, should do that, don't want to do this, don't want to do that (exercise, diet, clean house, give non-stop unconditional love and attention to everyone, save the world, conserve energy, recycle, etc.).

The mental landscape reconstitutes daily.

Fighting it is the trap of becoming more entangled in it.

Let it be.   Let the mind machine do what it does, which is to play out endless internal conflicts.

Yet the magic of awareness is here all the time.   Awareness doesn't say a thing.   It sees, sees, sees.  It is the rays of light that shine away the mind-fog.


~

Seeing through the veil of the mind

The mind is a wondrous instrument, like a glass to focus the rays of consciousness.  But when the mind is seen not as an instrument but as "self", then confusion and suffering result.  This was brought home to me today as I read  a wonderful book, Only That: the life and teaching of Sailor Bob Adamson, by Kalayani Lawry.

Bob had spent 17 years as an alcoholic, frequently getting into brawls, and, by his own admission,  filled with feelings of resentment and self-pity.  Bob spent time with Nisargadatta in 1976-77.

Here is a passage from the book:

" 'What Nisargadatta was saying and continually pointing out was that...the images, ideas and imaginings that I had about myself weren't the truth.'

"Bob realized the essence of what Nisargadatta was saying...He understood the mind was the problem and in clearly seeing it he thought he'd never get hooked in again.  Then at the end of the session, when he walked out the door and into the street, he immediately got caught up in the mind.  It was different, though, because having seen that the problem was the mind, when he'd seemingly get hooked in, he'd say to himself, 'Hey, wait a minute.  This was seen through the other day; what's this about?'  It would pull him up and he'd have another look and see that it was 'just more of the same old mind crap.'

" 'Those old habit patterns had been there for years and did not immediately stop,' he said. 'When the chatter of self-pity and resentment started up again, there was a remembering that actually there was nothing there and so it wouldn't last.'  Each time Bob saw the falsity, it would lose its intensity and the suffering began to ease off."  (p.41)

Everyday I find there is a continual process of getting lost in mind stories, and then waking up from those mind stories.  Little stories like, "I wish I were somewhere else right now."  That's a kind of story based on an unquestioned assumption that something is lacking in this moment.  All the little grumblings of the mind are an invitation to awareness to see through the thought-stories.  The density of thought is thinned by the energy of awareness.  There's an influx of consciousness as the stories of the mind are seen to be thoughts and not reality.

The mind is a wondrous instrument, but the capacity to see the mind is even more wondrous.

What sees the mind, what is aware of thoughts?  Who knows?  Call it presence, call it higher consciousness, call it Timbuktu...There is a capacity to see through the veil of thought, and to rest in this seeing/being.

Mary, Jack, and I are running out the door to attend an end-of-the-school year party at Chris's school.  Whoever you are, wherever you are, I send you all good will, as we together enjoy seeing through the veil of mind.

The book Only That is available here:
http://www.non-dualitypress.com/
Nisargadatta website is here:
http://www.nisargadatta.net/
Sailor Bob Adamson website is here:
:http://members.iinet.net.au/~adamson7/index.html

Releasing long cherished notions

Every day ideas gripped tightly in the mind are gripped less tightly.


~