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.
~

Suffering as fuel for awakening

For a long time I've wondered what it means for the energy of unhappiness to become transmuted into the energy of increased consciousness. This morning I had a tiny taste of what this means and I'd like to share it with you.

There was a subtle, barely detectable sense of boredom, a very mild discontent somewhere in the background of my awareness. This kind of slight discomfort is normally shoved out of the way, to the periphery of awareness, like an annoying insect being shooed aside.  This pushing away or ignoring of minor unease generally happens automatically, without even being noticed.

But today there was a movement in the opposite direction. The boredom wasn't avoided or evaded in any way.

It became a kind of invitation to a gentle, non-judgmental, interested, and quiet awareness.

I wrote in my journal: When there is boredom or any flavor of discontent, notice it, observe it, witness it, allow it, be present with it.

Then I sat quietly for a while and this is what happened.  The energy of nonjudgmental awareness, the energy of the witnessing presence grew. Simultaneously, the energy of discontent and boredom subsided.  In this way, unhappiness was transmuted into a keener awareness. Discontent became the fuel for awakening.

It's fun to play with this transformation of suffering into consciousness when the suffering is very tiny. The same process applies to large emotional upheavals, but for me it seems easier and more effective to go through this process at first with a very mild inner turbulence. Hope you enjoy your own experiments of spinning straw into gold.

An hour after I posted this I stumbled across these words from Nisargadatta:

All happiness comes from awareness. The more we are conscious, the deeper the joy. Acceptance of pain, non-resistance, courage and endurance - these open deep and perennial sources of real happiness, true bliss.

(from Non-Duality Highlights, # 4121)

~

Gratitude for image: http://www.pangolin.com/powered/index2.htm

A bird does not sing because it has an answer.

A bird does not sing because it has an answer.
It sings because it has a song.

Chinese proverb







I used to feel that a moment free from thought had no particular value. I used to feel that thinking was a better way to spend time than not thinking. I used to wallpaper every moment with a million ruminations.

Thinking felt productive, like it was getting me somewhere, finding answers, figuring life out. A blank mind, free of thought, was a wasted moment. It was zoning out, vegging out, goofing off, being frivolous. Thought was the vehicle to wisdom, understanding, and insight.

I was bound and determined to think-my-way to happiness.

And every thought took me away from the realm of no-thought that is happiness itself.


It has also been a surprise to discover that alert no-thought is actually more intelligent than thought. The space of no-thought is the source of any intelligence that shows up in thought. The no-thought that is "upstream" of thought is the source of creativity and wisdom.

While thought can be a beautiful and powerful tool, a lot of thought is unnecessary and destructive. Who doesn't have a merciless voice of internalized self-criticism? Or, even worse, a secret voice of thought that whispers hopes of personal specialness? Self-hatred and narcissism are two sides of a coin that have one thing in common: me, me, me. Which is the point of the bulk of thought: to conjure and perpetuate this huge fiction of separate me-hood. Thought builds up an imagined sense of me that must be constantly maintained and expanded. It is exhausting. It is a parasite draining life energy.

The me-image is fragile and flimsy and insecure by nature, as any image is a frail and evanescent thing. An image (especially the self-image) has a bottomless craving for attention, for without attention, where is the image? Poof! It is gone that easily.



These days there is a treasuring of the space of no-thought, whether thoughts are present or not. In the morning when consciousness opens its eyes on a new day, it savors the glint of silence between thoughts. So many of the thoughts that arise are recognized as unimportant, or as luring conscious attention towards hooking into some new drama of suffering, stirring up a new pot of pain.  Sometimes the unnecessary suffering cooked up by thought-stories is caught early on and the drama is side-stepped, nipped in the bud.  Other times I'm swept into the waking dream of thought lock-stock-and-barrel and ride out the storm.  Either way, all the while the space of no-thought gleams with fathomless presence. Attention opens from the thoughts to the space of awareness in which the thoughts occur. Such freedom here now in this space!

~
Gratitude for photo of Mourning Dove available at this link:
http://www.bird-friends.com/pics/MourningDove/MourningDove3LR.jpg

Feeling feelings

Both personally and in my work in mental health, I have come to see that the value of feeling our feelings (rather than avoiding or indulging them) cannot be overstated. The "emotion phobic" tendency that seems to be inbuilt in us drives all kinds of addiction, over-consumption, violence, etc. Therefore I love this video (which applies equally to men and women) that invites us to experience our feelings nonverbally. Thinking about feelings is the opposite of feeling them; thinking is a defense and barrier against unpleasant feelings, it is a distancing mechanism which walls us off from our own life energy. When we block out the "bad" stuff (unpleasant feelings), the "good" stuff is equally blocked out. A kinked hose blocks the flow of any fluid equally.

The body and psyche are overstuffed suitcases full of repressed emotional material. I feel this is true to some extent for every human being. How do we "unpack" the suitcase of stuffed feelings? We don't. It unpacks itself. Whatever feelings are present in this moment are all that need to be met. We don't have to worry about whatever accumulation of grief and fear is lodged in the tissues, it will surface of its own accord at exactly the right time and pace. This makes it simple: we need only meet what is here now with openness and silence. I find that the "taste" of even unpleasant feelings can be surprisingly enjoyable when they are experienced on an energetic level without labels or judgments.

Flooding feelings with the energy of consciousness is inherently beneficial.

This is very different than ruminating over feelings or trying to work out a bad mood with the thinking process- this usually backfires and embeds the feelings somewhere in the "suitcase" of body and psyche.

Thought is used as a kind of protective shield to fend off unwanted feelings through analysis, rationalization, explanation, blame, guilt, etc. In whatever way the mind can label, package, shelve, project or otherwise "get rid" of unpleasant feelings, it will do so. This is how we get tied up in knots and drive the brain-engine to an ever increasing and chaotic velocity.

From an evolutionary, biological perspective, the capacity of thought to fend off unwanted feelings through judgment, analysis, repression, etc., may have been useful. But this once helpful survival mechanism has "gone overboard" and hypertrophied to the point where thinking has become a mental disease. We don't need to "throw out the baby with the bathwater"- thinking can still be beautiful and beneficial- but when thinking is used to alienate us from our feelings, it is harmful rather than helpful. The mind and thought processes have swollen to such an extent that they cause much personal and planetary suffering.

Enjoy this wonderful video that invites us to enter the energy of present feelings.

~
Gratitude to Chameli Ardagh. You can read about Chameli in the outstanding book Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Wisdom, by Rita Marie Robinson.

What is here.

Listening to the sound of the dishwasher and looking at the cat napping on the blue chair, something is suddenly clear (it becomes visible as if  floating up to the surface of water).  It is this:  The mind will never be able to tell me who I am.  I've searched long and hard in the mind to discover my identity and it is not there.  I won't find myself in any thought or story or experience, not even in the experience or story of awakening, enlightenment, or self-realization.  Identifying with mind-objects (i.e. seeking my identity in objects such as thoughts, stories, experiences) is the basic confusion that I have suffered from. It's the basic confusion we all suffer from.

Even though I am myself always (it cannot be otherwise), there can be a sense of not knowing who I am, of being strangely lost and disconnected from the reality of my being.  Of being out of touch with what is most vital and real within me.

There is a longing to know directly who I am apart from any mental ideas.

What I want is some kind of fundamental, conscious contact with the being, the actuality of the life that I am in this moment.

What is prior to any mental idea of who I am?  What is here in the absence of thought?  What am I apart from ego, apart from any personal history? What is here right now?



The awareness or being that everything shows up in is prior to any appearance.

In seeing this, sensing this, there is a plunge into immediacy, a wake-up slap of reality.

Attention had been locked on the clouds (thoughts, appearances) and now opens to the sky (presence/essence).

This sky of awareness or presence is here at all times; inseparable from the experiences that arise but not confined to them.

I am in no way separate from my experience, but my experiences are not who I am. There is great freedom in this fact.  The sky is not confined by the clouds within it, and no human being is defined by thought.

The sky is not diminished when the clouds dissolve. If anything, the sky is even more present, or more apparent, when there are no clouds. A sky naked of clouds is not less of a sky. Without all the buzz of experience and thought, what I am is not diminished, but unveiled or more readily apparent. Without a big pile of accomplishments and failures and ideas and experiences (without all these clouds in the sky), the true essence of the reality that I am- the sky of awareness- is more readily apparent.  The very things I sought to define myself did just the opposite: they obscured "my" reality- the wide open sky.  All the things I thought defined me were more like a mask that alienated me from my reality.

What I want to know is not so much what I am but that I am.  I want to feel/sense/know my reality, that indeed I am very much alive, aware, in this instant, un-separated from life itself.

I am.

I am!

What could be more astonishing than the am-ness of anything at all, the am-ness that is typing these words, reading these words, the am-ness that is ubiquitous in the single sky that is everything?

There is a sensing/feeling/knowing that I am.  I can't wrap it up in a neat little mental package, but I can be what I am- effortlessly, unceasingly, like the space of the sky.

The joy of being is something real and present and accessible, and it is more satisfying than any passing experience.  Why pine after a cloud when the wealth of the sky is here?

What I want, it turns out, is what I've got:  Life.  Life as it is in this moment.


Not a single movement of the mind is needed to be what I am.

Not a single thing needs to be different in order for me to be fully who I am.  There is no circumstance that can block the fullness of being.

The dishwasher is quiet and the cat is still napping on the blue chair.  The presence that is here is alive and a great wave of benevolence moves through.  Thank you for being here and sharing this space.


~
Gratitude to Annette Nibley for pointing out that "without a single movement of the mind" being is known. Annette's extremely lucid writing can be accessed here:  http://www.whatneverchanges.com/

Thanks also to the video of Stuart Schwartz on Never Not Here TV, which powerfully points attention to the obvious. Video can be accessed here:  http://www.nevernothere.com/stuart-schwartz

Awareness held hostage

This morning I am struck by some words from Huang Po:

"There is only one reality, neither to be realized nor attained.  To say 'I am able to realize something' or 'I am able to attain something' is to place yourself among the arrogant.  The men who flapped their garments and left the meeting as mentioned in the Lotus Sutra were just such people.  (These people THOUGHT they had understood and were smugly self-satisfied.)  Therefore the Buddha said:  'I truly obtained nothing from Enlightenment.'  There is just a mysterious tacit understanding and no more."

This knocks the wind out of my seeking- it is recognized as a self-fueled obsession that enhances the false notion of separate self-hood, digging deeper the pit of suffering and delusion.

Freedom from the obsession with grasping opens awareness to what is already here.

This breath.

This silence, permeating all the noise, all the thoughts.

Awareness had been held hostage to ideas of more, to ideas of getting free, ideas of being a better me, a happier me, an enlightened me.

The hostage is no longer held hostage when these ideas lose their allure... their falsity is recognized.  No ransom to be gained, the 'kidnapper' (believed delusions) lets the 'hostage' (awareness) go.

It's an ordinary day.  Sunday mass at 11:30, and then all five of us will go see the new movie, Karate Kid.

Awareness opens outside of the mind and into the fullness of no-thing.  Awareness is untethered from the torture machine of external seeking as the futility of the machine is recognized.

Freedom from seeking doesn't mean stagnation.  It means movement toward goals is unhindered by anxiety.

THIS floods awareness, this life in this moment.

May we all enjoy the abundance of no-mind.  The vastness and real-ness of nonverbal consciousness is here, free for the noticing, whenever attention opens wider than the TV-in-the-head.


(Note: Gratitude to Jan Frazier, author of When Fear Falls Away, for the phrase "awareness held hostage." Here is a link for Jan's website:http://www.janfrazierteachings.com/. The essays on Jan's website are highly recommended.)
(Quote is from The Zen Teaching of Huang Po, translated by John Blofield, p. 45.)
(Gratitude for image available at this link: tomsteel.wordpress.com/ post dated Feb 13, 2008)

~

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