A miraculous field

 "Never bother naming an emotion again.


Just feel the energy of it."     Scott Kiloby




We think it's the emotion that hurts, when what actually 


causes the most pain is the word, the label, the name, the 


story we put on the emotion. 




An emotion experienced nonverbally is actually quite benign, 


even wondrous- one of the many colors of the rainbow of 


emotional experience.




Try it and see for yourself, experiments are fun.  It is 


possible to meet emotional experience with silent interest 


rather than fear.

It's so depressing to label sadness as sadness, but without 


the label... it's clear and sweet.



No emotion is an enemy, it's just a transient energy pattern 


in the miraculous field of being.






~


Gratitude to Scott Kiloby for posting the above words on Facebook. Scott's website is http://kiloby.com/

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/

~

Seeking completion versus being complete

Here are some words that gave me pause:

"At the root of a lifetime of seeking was always the assumption that life wasn't complete...And out of this assumption, in a million different ways the individual tried to reach completion, and turned to drink or drugs or meditation..."
Jeff Foster, foreward to Everyday Enlightenment by Sally Bongers

The hamster wheel of futile seeking is highly addictive and I've often felt enslaved to this compulsion to strive toward one mirage of future fulfillment after the next. Secretly I know that the seeking itself is digging the hamster wheel deeper into the mud rut of suffering.

When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging, says Will Rogers. Yet just stopping, just resting, is strangely terrifying. It means I'm lazy or missing the boat or wasting time or sinking into the jaws of stagnation. There is an imagined need to plunge into activity and seek completion through grabbing as much knowledge or satisfaction or recognition or enlightenment as I can before death overtakes me, as it could at any moment.

The mind puts forth many arguments against allowing the nondoing and silence into which it disappears. There is an enormous taboo against "nonproductive" use of time, and this taboo keeps us sprinting after endless wild goose chases. And the mind also thinks, "Even if activity isn't really getting me anywhere, at least it's staving off the dreadful feelings of boredom and uselessness." Meaningless activity is a universal anesthesia for the angst of being alive as a small, separate ego self. It makes the world go round.

There's no recipe or formula for getting off the hamster wheel or for recognizing the presence of wholeness, and that is good. It's not a mechanical process but something unique and spontaneous and creative and it happens by itself when we're not occupied with seeking it or avoiding it.

I had a rough weekend butting heads with my teenage daughter. Now we've worked things out and life goes on, and every day fresh-minted love for her arises in me out of nowhere. There is a strange comfort in not knowing. I can't pretend to know who my daughter is or what life is or what love is. When I thought I knew I was living in a small, cramped room. Not knowing feels so much more honest and unbounded.

Resting doesn't mean literally laying in bed all day. What rests is the anxious voice in the head that says "I have to get somewhere." Resting means moving through activities without attention being completely absorbed by the inner narration of a protagonist-me hacking its way through the neverending obstacle-course of daily life. It means gazing silently into present reality and sensing deeply the awareness in which everything appears.

There is plenty we can do to express the good will that is at our core, but that doing does not spring from a sense of incompletion. It is an outpouring from the completion we all experience on the level of being. There may still be times of feeling like a hamster on a wheel, an ego in samsara, but the dimension of silence is also here, and it is always possible to fall backwards into its arms.