Choose Again

the hunter and the hunted

I've been asking myself if I have anything more to say here. Keep thinking I might and then nothing comes. However, lately, one understanding has been at the forefront of my mind, and I thought I'd share that with you.

I often have dreams in which I'm in a building or an apartment, and I discover some hidden rooms--lofts, additional bedrooms, extravagant decks with views of rushing water, beautiful attic spaces as big as barns that keep on leading, always leading, into more and more spaces. The dream expands as I go exploring. The new rooms blossom in the light of my dare-I-hope expectation and enthusiasm. There is an air of mystery and deep appreciation in these dreams. A sense of delight.

The spaces are sometimes unfinished or raw looking, messy, but full of potential--waiting for a creative hand.

If I had to give someone a definition of human life in this physical plane of existence, this is how I would describe it. Seemingly solid, and yet utterly influenced by focused expectation and anticipatory delight. The environment expands according to thought. It seems set in fact and it seems concretized but it is not. It is blooming and alive and it never stops moving and changing and offering.

Most importantly, it seems finite and is not. It seems self-evident and is not. It demands that the words "despite all appearances to the contrary" be imprinted on the inside of your eyeballs to remind you continually that this dream, this solid-seeming dream of life, is influenced by your focus and is awaiting your command.

And what is the key that opens this golden door to the ever-expanding sense of limitless life? It's the understanding that this now, this very now in which we sit and breathe and sweat and perhaps suffer. This very now is brilliant. There is nothing wrong with it. It is perfect as it is. Despite all appearances to the contrary. It is without a single flaw.

hearing the music

A musician friend of mine is trying to get into a career of performing, but when he's singing, he has a hard time carrying a tune. I didn't know that this was even possible until my brother, who is a composer, informed me that many highly talented people in music can't automatically get their vocal chords to match what they are hearing. And, to my surprise, I have learned that the ability to carry a tune is something that can be learned.

I was on the internet the other day googling around to see what kinds of approaches people use to learn this skill and caught one snippet of information that stuck with me. It had to do with what you experience in your body when the tone you are singing is not matching the tone you are hearing. The writer described it as a kind of dissonant pulsing or thumping sensation. When you feel that sensation, it means that what you are offering is not a match to what you are hearing.

Lately I have been viewing any kind of negative emotion—from minor feelings of irritation to major sensations of unease—in a similar way. It's become more and more obvious to me that there are always two points of view occurring simultaneously in the human experience. There is the unconditionally loving, absolutely-fine-with-everything, calm, joyous serenity of the Inner Self (or whatever you wish to call it) and the hectic, threatened, judging mind of the human (or the ego, if you wish to call it that).

Negative emotion arises whenever the dominant vibration we are offering is not matching the dominant vibration the Inner Self is offering. In other words, when there is a mismatch between the way the Inner Self sees a situation and the way we are interpreting it, there is a dissonant pulsing sensation that we then interpret as jealousy, or envy, or anger, or resentment, or indignation or lack of some kind. The dissonance occurs before we assign the story of why or how things are "not right" to the sensation of vibrational clash.

So negative emotion, if you can catch it before you become too entrenched in the story you have given it, is actually nothing more than a clue. It's as though we are all tone deaf and are learning, first of all, to hear the clear tone being offered by the Inner Self, and second of all to align ourselves with it.

When we can align ourselves with it, there is only joy—no pain, no suffering, no resistance. We all align ourselves with our Inner Self many times a day for moments. Maybe when you first step outside in the morning and it's a gorgeous spring day and you take that first deep breath of fresh, cool air. Moments of thought-free delight are all moments of alignment.

This doesn't mean that if you aren't blissful all the time there is anything wrong. There is absolutely nothing to be gained by not enjoying the contrast of the two tones. But if you are in pain, or if you are reveling in complaint, or if you hare experiencing a feeling you don't enjoy, you can listen for the tone your Inner Self is offering. It does not have a problem with what's happening right here, right now. It can see the whole picture and knows that all is very, very well.

However, in order to align with the way the Inner Self is seeing the situation, you have to relinquish your own judgment about the current manifestation. It's a "despite the way things may seem to me, the truth is that..." kind of a thing. The current manifestation is very solid, very flashy, full of sensation. But if you continue to focus on it in a reactive way that generates negative emotion (the clue) it cannot change.

hi

I haven't written here in quite a while! I'm thinking about doing a redesign of this blog and refreshing its intent, which has changed since I began it in 2007. At that time I was documenting my spiritual search. Now the whole idea of "spiritual search" makes no sense any longer. For a while, my intent here was to explain what this "no longer making sense" looked like, while getting comfortable with the loss of a previously saved version of my self-concept.

All of the above sounds too complicated to me because life feels so much simpler now. Yet none of what I experience fits into any particular religious or spiritual belief set. It's not a dramatic loss of self, or a continual feeling of oneness, or an alignment with any kind of belief system whatsoever. It's a just a very simple, ongoing practice of letting go of resistance to what is. It is a getting comfortable with what is and realizing there is nothing wrong with it. There is no problem.

This is tricky, though, and bears repeating. The bottom line is that through the habitual nature of our repetitive thought patterns and our repetitive emotional patterns, we are creating our own experience of physical manifestation. Physical manifestation is a lot like a dream, only more stable. And, being like a dream, it responds to our thoughts.

However, what we are experiencing as physical reality right now is the culmination of diligently practiced human individual and group thought forms. So you could say, in human terms, that what you are experiencing right now is the past. It is already over. Yet because we, as humans, take our cues from the manifestation--from looking at "what is out there"--we keep reinforcing the same old shit. We look outside of ourselves and see what we think is reality and we focus on it and judge it and react to it and with our magical, powerful attention, reinforce the solidity of the manifestation.

When you judge something you are resisting it. When you resist you reinforce. Whatever you are resisting becomes even more solid. Crazy, isn't it? But this is the way it works. Any kind of attention, be it adoration or hatred, reinforces the object of said attention. So the whole goal is to be at peace with what is. To just let it be. To just be.

As you "just be" and sink into the comfort of that non-doing, you cease to reinforce the habitual patterns and they become lighter and more transparent. And new patterns that flow naturally from your being--patterns that are more benevolent--begin to create your experience.

Herein lies the oft-mentioned paradox. Even though we may be looking down the gullet of a fire-breathing dragon, we need to relax and just be. We need to find a way to love what is. The fire-breathing dragon is a result of habitual thought patterns and the only way the manifestation will stop scorching you is if you take responsibility for dropping your habitual thoughts.

The important thing to understand is that for most people this cannot be done all at once. It's an incremental process, despite the fact that there are select individuals for whom it happens all at once. For most of us, it's a process of learning to steadily and slowly train our attention away from dwelling on the manifestation while simultaneously appreciating and reveling in the safety of the present moment. You will make mistakes, you will try and fail, and you will ultimately succeed.

It's a slow process of learning to look at and take responsibility for the thoughts you are entertaining, the story you are telling, the way you are feeling. And it's a slow process of beginning to allow yourself to feel good, to be who you are, and to allow the love that is your birthright to enter your moment-to-moment experience.

This also means that, as you incrementally allow yourself to feel better, you can safely cycle through whatever emotions may arise. It's better to allow yourself to experience anger or grief than to feel powerless, for example. We're not talking about some pollyanna idea of all of us turning into emotional daffodils. It's a matter of leaning into the essential goodness and benevolence that is deep within you. It is sturdy and powerful and can handle being real.

red light, green light

Stopping at a red light one morning on the way to work, the sky still pink tinged from sunrise, trees silhouetted against the snow, the red of the traffic light a brilliant spot of luminous color in the urban landscape, I fell into the moment and realized that I was thoroughly enjoying being stopped... being made to wait.

It was easy to enjoy--no big zen deal--because we all know that within the experience of the red light, lies the experience of the green light. We have no doubts about that. We are asked to stop, and then we are allowed to go. The going is contained within the stopping. We know this so thoroughly that if the traffic light were to malfunction and stay red, we would all just take turns going. We wouldn't stand there forever, focused on the red light, saying "I can't go!"

Stopping guarantees going; the journey guarantees the destination; the question guarantees the answer. Easy to say, hard to live?

Let's say you have a couple of weeks off and you decide to take a train to visit a close friend who moved 500 miles away to a new city. During the majority of your travel time, you are definitely not in the city of your friend. You're not there, you're not there, you're not there. Yet you have purchased your ticket and there is no doubt in your mind that the experience of actually being there will occur. You let go and allow the railway company to manage the experience of getting you there, much in the same way that you let go and allow the traffic lights to manage the experience of an intersection.

That interval between the identification of your desire (a reunion with your beloved friend) and the realizing of it in time and space, is pleasurable. You can allow the interval to be fun because you do not doubt the outcome.

When you enter into an experience of uncertainty or lack, the experience itself creates within you a dissonance that evokes its opposite. The journey to your destination begins automatically. Yet where we become confused is in that time interval between the experience of lack and the experience of fulfillment. In that interval, we tend to use our focus in the wrong way--in a way that actually widens the gap.

We tend to focus on the current manifestation: the physical pain, the financial problem, the emotional hurt, the inconvenience, the spiritual emptiness. And as we use the powerful magic of our focus to drill into the current manifestation with complaint or resistance, it responds like a plant to water. It gets "worse."

This is the magical paradox. We need to learn to ignore what seemingly "is" and let go with an open heart as though we actually believe that the destination is being managed and taken care of. It's like pushing an elevator button and then allowing the elevator to take you where you want to go. You don't have to micromanage the elevator--it knows how to get you there--you just have to push the button.

This is another way of looking at the idea of active trust. So when those life situations arise that resonate with uncertainty, learn to recognize that you are now in the elevator, you are on the train, you are stopped at the red light. Just savor the moment and let go. Enjoy the question, because it will soon be replaced with the answer.

magic eight-ball

I recently got a new iMac for home. I have computers in my studio upon which I do my paying design work and create my so-far-not-paying artwork, but I got one for home so that when I wake up in the middle of the night I can work on some piece of art or other. Those middle-of-the-night hours are brilliant for this kind of thing.

It was a gift to myself. I've always been a pretty ascetic person. My husband teases me about being more Presbyterian than any of his forebears. I can easily deny myself things, and have always preferred a pared-down lifestyle, simple clothing, modest possessions and so on. He says I haven't ever stopped worrying that the cossacks will come in the middle of the night and I'll have to put everything I own on my back and flee. (I just wrote "feel" instead of "flee" — beautiful!)

At any rate, I got this huge 27-inch iMac that is so fast it feels like a bullet train. It's my middle-of-the-night art machine. It feels like an extravagance…. it's a joy machine. The other night I was not quite ready to work on some art at 2 a.m., so thought I'd do a blog post instead. I wanted to talk about forms of resistance and the concept of active trust. I wanted to make them more practical. Like give you a list of methods…. what is and what is not resistance, active trust, and so on.

I logged onto typepad, wrote three sentences and my iMac shut off. Just shut off. And immediately (once I got my pulse under control), I saw that I had a choice as to how to interpret this occurrence. I suppose I could compare the experience to buying a brand new Mercedes (while feeling a bit guilty about it), and coming out to drive it to a vacation destination the next morning, in a state of thrilled anticipation, only to have it stall out three blocks from home.

For whatever reason, this kind of thing hits me very deeply. I had a childhood in which I spent quite a lot of energy trying to hide my creativity, or keep it within forms that would please my parents, and in so doing completely lost track of it—until recently. I found it intact and buried in the back 40 of my being, and it started up with a little coaxing and is now giving me the ride of my life. It is such a great pleasure for me that I fear its loss. I lost it once and don't want to lose it again.

Perhaps I lost it the first time because I interpreted it as being "bad" the way children will, for one misguided reason or another. So the fear of punishment came rocketing out of me when my iMac shut off spontaneously. I was being punished for "having" something I wanted, letting my guard down, and opening myself up for disappointment.

THAT is resistance. Something happens and you shout NO. You see it through the eyes of the ego, the eyes of the human. These are the only eyes that believe in the concept of punishment. We invented it. When something unexpected happens, or something we don't like, we project upon that occurrence the human interpretation and we resist it. We don't want it. We are not open to another interpretation of it.

I went into the kitchen and sat down and looked out into the snowy night. I recognized that I was in a state of resistance. I wanted to fix the situation right now! I did NOT want to feel the feelings I was having. I wanted it all to go away. So I knew that I had to work with my mind until it softened and I could open back up and be in the moment without resistance.

I first tried to sit and meditate a bit, just to let go of the obsessive reaction thoughts I was having. I tried to gather in my mind and bring it to the breath, but there was too much resistance. It's like trying to talk sense to a tantruming child. Better to just walk out of the room, because any word or action feeds the fire.

Next I opened up A Course in Miracles, my go-to first aid kit. I turned to my favorite lesson, lesson 5: I am never upset for the reason I think. Then I turned to lessons 23 and 26, which deal with releasing resistance in a very direct way. That helped a little bit.

And then, after about a half hour, I let go. I invoked the spell of active trust. I decided to trust that the machine was protecting me, correcting my timing, or asking me to look more closely at my energy right then. I said, okay, so be it. I'm okay with this. I will assume that this is a good thing for one reason or another and I will cease to resist. I opened my hands and my heart and actively decided right then to align myself with the moment, come what may.

And really, this is a better post than the one I was going to write. Moving from resistance to active trust is a daily, moment to moment thing. The key thing to understand is this: the desires of your heart are known and loved. But in order to experience their fulfillment, it is of paramount importance that you move your focus from its mesmerized position—riveted to the "faulty" manifestation that is occurring in your life.

You need to move your focus away from concentration upon what you don't want or don't have, to concentration upon the feeling of everything being okay. This is what makes things okay.

only our own resistance

I didn't fully comprehend, when I put that statement up at the top of the header, that it would continue unfolding for me the way it has.

As humans we are a little bit like flowers on the end of a stem, or leaves on a tree branch. We have a source that is fueling our existence, yet we appear differentiated from that source. In the early stages of their spiritual journey, many people mistakenly believe that in order to proceed on the path, they need to somehow deny that experience of differentiation as though there were something impure or wrong about it. The only thing wrong about it is that it hurts to feel disconnected.

The truth is that the stem revels in the experience of the flower and the tree revels in the experiences of the leaves, and our source revels in our experiences as humans.

We only feel cut off from our source—from our tree trunk or stem—when we resist. And we resist because we feel unsupported and afraid, because we feel cut off from our source. It's a vicious cycle, but what we learn is that we can stop it through the use of active trust. Active trust is the releasing of resistance. It's not necessarily trust in anything specific. it is the emotional state of trust. It's a letting go of the oars and allowing the boat to float.

A Course in Miracles belabors this point endlessly and beautifully. When we are upset about anything it is because we feel abandoned by love, set adrift and cut off from our source. We fear punishment because of that very sensation of being cut off. The solution? "I need do nothing."

Were we to let go and appreciate the everyday, ordinary experience of being human, without resistance, we would experience a deep and peaceful joy—the joy of the tree, the roots and the stem—as well as our petals and leaves.

Joy is an indicator. In every small and large way, joy is the thing that lets you know you're on the right track. If you knew that everything were okay, that every problem you seem to have was being taken care of, and you could just let go and let the current carry you... how would you feel?

That feeling—the releasing of struggle and resistance—is what allows you to feel connected to your source. It lets you feel nurtured and cared for, supported and loved.

This is not to say that if you are not feeling joy, or if there is a circumstance with which you are struggling, that you are doing anything wrong. There is no such thing as doing something wrong. As the Buddha said, there is suffering and the release from suffering. There is nothing to achieve. There is only the experience of resistance and the releasing of resistance.

field report

Seems like I should have something to say by now, don't you think?

There's a temptation, when you come to the proverbial "end of seeking" to talk about how great it is, here at the end of the road. But that's all nonsense. It's great everywhere, is the thing.

The whole "end of seeking" business is really about the end of a certain type of confusion. It's a type of confusion that removes value-fulfillment from one's experience by seemingly separating it from you either in space or in time.

That was a mouthful. I'm trying to talk around it, rather than approach it headlong, because the headlong approach is so simple as to sound almost idiotic, but I may have to resort to that.

The power is yours. There is nothing you cannot experience if you wish to experience it. But in order to experience it, you have to feel as though you are already immersed in the experience. However you figure out to do this, is fine.

So for example, what if this, just this, were enlightenment? Just this plain old moment in your sweatpants and with your coffee cup. Isn't it a beautiful moment, a miraculous moment? Did you catch just a nano-particle of that before you started thinking again?

What I have found is that the plain old moment and the power within it is a magnificent game. I am loving the playing of it. I have lost interest in awakening or enlightenment. I have no idea what those things are supposed to be, because this is pretty damned fine.

Have you ever noticed that when you begin some kind of chore—say, digging your way to China (or America for my Chinese readers) with a teaspoon—in the beginning you are totally focused on the goal and its impossibility and the dreadful predicament you seem to be in? Wretched inadequate spoon, awful weather, terrible accommodations, and all that.

But then, somewhere around middle-earth, you start to get into it. You forget to compare this new digging-life with any other experience or imagining, and you just completely abandon yourself to the spoon, the dirt, the wet, the heat, the cold, the "is-ness" of it all. And you feel full of power. You don't care if you ever get to the other side. You are loving the digging. Digging the love. And the whole thing is just fine.

See? I told you it sounds idiotic. Anyway. Questions? Because seriously, folks, I am just about out of words!

the purpose of cheering up

I've talked a bit (well probably more than a bit) about the trap of wanting to fix things... of wanting to change the present moment, to change what you are experiencing, to make it better, make it different. I've come at this in a variety of ways because it's such an important thing to understand.

Understanding it consistently takes a whole lot of mindfulness. But if you do sincerely want to have less suffering and more joy in your life, understanding how this works is worth the little bit of discipline it entails.

Chogyam Trungpa always used to say, "Please, cheer up." Really, that about says it all. He was big on hinting at, or evoking a state of mind, rather than spelling it out.

The truth is that you experience what you concentrate upon. Your habitual tone, your habitual emotional resonance right now is drawing from the resources of this magical manifestation-experience everything that is needed to bring that tone into three dimensions.

So let's bring this down to earth. Let's say you are working at a crappy job. You not only don't enjoy your work, you find your coworkers to be annoying in the extreme and your boss to be insufferable. Yet you are the breadwinner of your family, and you believe (realistically or not) that you can't "just quit" without having a new job lined up.

The reality of your job is very vivid. It's very solid—solidly annoying, solidly intolerable. It's there every day... the sights, the sounds, the smell of the stale coffee, the clashing perfumes, the sound of the person in the cubicle next door as she clicks at her keyboard, and so on. It's hitting you in the face every minute with its solidity. How can you deny that? How can you pretend that this shitty present moment is okay? It's clearly not okay! You would be betraying yourself if you didn't protest... right?

Wrong.

We experience what we focus upon. When you are protesting, what are you focusing upon? You are focusing upon how bad you feel. It's a matching game, folks.

We are mesmerized by the vivid solidity of the experience we are having. We are fascinated by it. It's so solid, so real. We focus upon it. And we do something else as we focus upon it. We judge it. We judge it as pleasant or painful, and all of the thousands of levels in between.

This activity—of focusing upon this vivid reality with its sights, sounds, smells, tastes and concepts, and then judging these experiences by comparing them to others that have happened in the past or others that might happen in the future—this activity or mental busy-ness—is what makes us feel valid. It makes us feel real. It gives us a sense of solidity. And the truth is that we are addicted to this activity. We just do it all day. We talk to ourselves all day, sorting, judging, weighing, liking, disliking.

This is what we do with our focus. But what we don't understand is that FOCUS is the most magical tool we have. It's the most powerful aspect of our minds. It's the creative aspect of our minds. It's the letter in the universal mailbox, the genie in the lamp, the granting of every wish.

So what is required is something very counter-intuitive—very paradoxical. If you want to change your situation you must begin to find ways to love it—to focus upon whatever aspects of the situation are tolerable. Maybe you like the donuts in the break room, or the hand soap in the bathroom, or the guy who delivers the mail.

Now you think to yourself, "But if I focus upon what I like in this situation, I'll be stuck here!" That's the logic of ego, and it's backwards. You get more of what you focus upon. Life manifests according to your use of focus and intent. We are afraid to find the good in a bad situation, but it's the only way out.

This is the meaning of letting go. This is the meaning of "love holds no grievances." This is the reason for these types of concepts. This is the meaning of forgiveness. Until the focus changes, and the intention changes, the manifestation cannot change.

So maybe you think, "But I can fix this situation!" Examine what you mean by that. In order to fix something, where do you put your focus? You put your focus on what is wrong. If you were putting your focus on what is good in a situation, you wouldn't feel the need to fix it, would you?

The manifestation follows the focus. Peel back the layers of your thought process and find what is at the bedrock. Is it acceptance? Is it appreciation? If so, your experience will begin to reflect those qualities by being fun. Fun. Now I'm not talking about forcing yourself to think in a certain way, or punishing yourself by being nice to your office mate, whom you can't stand. I'm talking about noticing in your day whatever tiny bits of joy, of fun, might exist and just feeling that—becoming familiar with that sensation.

I'm talking about noticing when you are caught in a litany of complaint and making a decision to drop it. Just put it down and be empty. Just feel that quiet, defenseless emptiness instead of the fullness of complaint. Stand there and just "don't know." Yes, this may feel odd, and it may feel like self-betrayal at first, but has what you have been doing worked? Why not try something different. That soft, empty, quiet feeling of not-knowing is the magical muscle of intent beginning to move.

Quietly allowing our atrophied muscles of focus to move in new ways, is what it's all about.

feeding the geese

There's a big old cemetery in my neighborhood that has a couple of large ponds on its grounds. Over the years the ponds have attracted quite a population of water fowl and since people tend to feed them, they've stuck around. There are a few different varieties of loud, fat domestic geese and during the summer there are flocks of shy, elegant Canada geese as well. And of course ducks and seagulls. It's a very noisy, boisterous crew.

My husband and I have always liked to go walking in this particular cemetery and eventually we began to also enjoy going to watch the geese, which led to occasionally bringing some leftover bread to feed to them, which led to the somewhat embarrassing fifty-pound sack of cracked corn we now keep in the trunk of the car, should we get a sudden urge to "go feed the geese."

A few months ago I began to notice that when I'm watching the geese I can easily call up what it means to have no agenda—to be perfectly okay with whatever is happening. It's a childhood summer vacation, no-adults-interfering kind of a feeling. It's an existence without self-reflection.

I like the Buddhist idea of "no reference point." Geese have no reference point. They are just what they are. They are bare awareness in a goose-wrapper, having the goose experience. As such, they are able to align and harmonize themselves with the moment point, without self-reflection, as it is.

We, on the other hand, have something additional going on. We have verbal thought. Verbal thought initiates the internal dialogue and once we begin talking to ourselves as children, we never stop. Everything that happens in the course of our daily lives is eaten and processed, commented upon and analyzed by the internal dialogue. It draws conclusions (which may or may not be true) and it creates concepts (ditto).

We have a primitive relationship with thoughts. I believe that our relationship with thought is so unexamined that it's something on the order of believing that the earth is located on the back of an infinite number of stacked turtles.

Using the internal dialogue (judgment) we create an endless number of false reference points to get us through the day with our misleading sense of self-reflection intact. We create concepts out of thin air by stringing words together and then enslave ourselves to the concepts. In this way we keep our world stable and static and because of this we experience that familiar stifling sense of undefined limitation, or, "is this all there is"-ness.

All you need to do is notice. Awareness itself can frame this whole experience of being-mesmerized-by-concepts and in doing so, create freedom. Awareness is pre-thought, post-thought, in-between thought. Like air, it is ever-present. It is what you are, and maybe what everything is. To rest in that... to just come to the edge of that without creating any more concepts—to go inwardly silent and cease to self-protect—is the key.

Another way is to realize the limitations of thought. Thought can't take you there, although it will try to convince you that it can. It can't take you there because there is here. Not some other here, but this here. And as you may have noticed, this here present moment is like teflon. Thought can't stick to it. So it's quiet and empty feeling.

We have a fear of that emptiness, but that's not our fear, it's thought's fear. Eventually, what feels empty and frightening will begin to feel spacious and welcoming.

treasure hunt

I recently re-read Hope, by Joel Rothschild. I may have mentioned him here before. He has lived for over 20 years with full-blown AIDS. When he was first diagnosed and many times since, after being given a prognosis of just months, he'd bounce back while others died.

Joel's thing is survival—the fine art of survival. He seems to be driven to survive not because he fears death, but because he has a fascination with and respect for this physical life.

In Hope he describes his methods. I was reading it last night before bed. When I awoke at 2 a.m., hot and sweaty, with traffic noise pounding in my ears and various worries pressing in, I remembered and used one of them.

In the midst of a typical summer night's tossing and turning, I slowed way down and turned my focus to whatever I could find that was pleasant. The cool spots on the sheets, a feeling in my body of pain-free health, the ability to breathe freely, the pleasing support of my mattress. Anything close in... very close and very now. When I found one thing, I'd simply enjoy it and then another thing would pop up.

What Joel discovered in his determination to live with AIDS and to continue to survive, was that he didn't have the luxury of indulging in negative, self-tormenting thoughts. His life depended on not doing so.

Most of us know this, but not as clearly as he does. When a doctor would give him a new diagnosis and he'd be gazing down the barrel of yet another devastating opportunistic infection, he'd of course be thrown into an immediate morass of negativity, but he'd systematically use awareness to light his way out.

Anything, anything at all—any tiny good thing, any tiny pleasant thing—a breeze, a breath, a color seen, a sensation, a drink of water when you're thirsty. It's like building a castle out of legos, one brick at a time, or creating a huge tapestry, one stitch at a time.

Each brick, each stitch is a very small, very plain, very unassuming experience of appreciation. Just this half eaten peach on a blue plate... the gold and red and blue. Just this smooth cool floor under your foot. Just the relief of a yawn.

Pull back and draw in from the speed and distraction of life. Get close and slow and look for just one small thing that feels, looks or sounds good to you. Scan your environment with that goal in mind, the way a child might look for seashells on a beach.

This isn't any kind of heavy-handed denial or forceful positive affirmation in the face of suffering. This is very small and humble. Very subtle and vulnerable. It takes almost no effort and is soothing to do. It allows you to connect with what is always there for you.

doubt and confusion

As the mind becomes more transparent and settled—as it slows down and becomes less aggressive and troublesome—life, our mirror, assumes these qualities as well. Life begins to feel calm and happy.

Every once in a while, though, a real-seeming problem will arise within the mind. It may be a response to something in your life that has never happened before, or perhaps a cumulative response to a series of minor events, but for whatever reason, a loss of mindfulness arises with it. The ego has weaseled its way into the driver's seat and you are now on a joy ride through a bad neighborhood.

When this happens, mental stories begin to spin out with a vengeance, and despite our best attempts at inquiry or mindfulness, it may be a few days (if we're lucky and it's not even longer) before the dust settles and it's possible to look clearly at what is happening.

These are periods of doubt and confusion. What had seemed clear is now murky. 

At times like this I like to think of life as an amusement park ride. I think I first got this analogy years ago from Guy Finley. You've bought your ticket and settled into your seat and the ride is taking you through all kinds of interesting attractions when suddenly it enters a haunted house. Although you may remember that the haunting isn't real, it starts to get to you. You begin to want "out."

"Wanting out" is resistance. The very same driver that detoured you into the scary stuff is now telling you to jump ship. Were you to obey its advice and get off the ride while it's passing through the haunted house, not only might you be stuck there engaging with the locals, but it might be quite a long time before you make your way back out into the light.

Stay on the ride. Let it deliver you into the sunshine, which it will if you stop fighting it and just see it instead. Realize that it's the ego that wants you to analyze the situation and find something or someone to blame for the way you feel. Resist the temptation to analyze and choose acceptance, instead. Awareness trumps ego, period.

You might try to name the state. Naming gives you power over it and brings you out of the story into the present moment. Look right at what you are feeling and see if you can find a descriptor for it, for example, "doubt and confusion." Or "anxiety." Focus your awareness on it as you repeat the name and see if it doesn't begin to lighten up a bit.

Lean into the feeling of uncertainty and just be with it. "Uncertainty." Just notice it. Negative states cannot withstand awareness. Abandon any desire to emerge triumphant—that's the ego again. Just surrender to the moment and the way it feels. Observe it. Let go, stay present, take a deep breath and trust the flow of life to deliver you.

It's a very soft and vulnerable feeling to be with your troubled heart without trying to "do something about it." That's a good place to be.

even the space between your fingers

I just finished reading "Lucid Dreaming, Gateway to the Inner Self," by Robert Waggoner. This is a book I'm sure I will turn to again and again. Beautifully done. The integrity of the author shines through every page.

Here's a quote from his account of a dream in which he was determined to find out if evil actually exists. Quite a brave soul, to seek out this kind of experience:

'"I stop and look intently at the deep darkness. Is there evil there?

Then, from within, I hear a voice deliver this message: "The light upholds the darkness." And suddenly I know that behind all apparent evil or darkness is light; and that it's light that gives us the sense of darkness.

Then I hear: "Everything is sacred and alive." I intuitively realize that the light is in every living creature as a condition of its existence.

And then I hear something more clarifying: "Even the space between your fingers is sacred and alive." I look at my outstretched hand and see the space between my fingers, that precious emptiness, and know with clarity that I live in a sacred universe, where even the apparent emptiness is aware and alive. With form or without, all is sacred and alive."'

the camel you rode in on

The usual idea of forgiveness is linear. Something hurtful happens to you, perpetrated by an outside agent whose victim you believe yourself to be. The victimizing happens in time—first the one thing, then the other. A Course in Miracles, among other teachings, tells us that in truth nothing has actually happened that can harm us. Who you are remains unharmed in the same way that when the dream-you is in a frightening dream, the "real" you is still safe at home, in bed.

Byron Katie would say that the situation itself cannot cause us to suffer. Only the stories we tell ourselves about the situation cause suffering.

We might then ask ourselves, why am I creating a frightening or painful life-dream? Why am I thinking in ways that cause me to suffer? Where did this come from? We may look into the past to find an answer and blame a parent or an abusive uncle or a disastrous situation. And then we may look into the future and think, well, once I have all this figured out and all that other stuff fixed, I'll be happy. We get busy with all kinds of agendas and yet in the present moment we still feel that there is a problem of some kind.

If you look closely at the suspected problem you'll see that it always consists of resistance to the present moment. Unfortunately, the present moment is our only vehicle. We're stranded in the desert and the present moment is our camel... that's it. No other way out.

You may wish you had a way out that wasn't so stinky and recalcitrant, but this camel is the only vehicle and the sooner you stop resisting it, the quicker the oasis will appear. However, you have to love the camel so much that you don't care if you ever reach the oasis. As a matter of fact you should forget that there is such a thing as an oasis. Let's stay in the desert forever!

This is forgiveness. Forgiveness is saying, okay, despite the manifest appearances, I'll let go of my grievances against this homely present moment. I will sink into it and let go of comparing it to any other moment and sit up tall on my camel, with some dignity and self-respect and let the moment show me itself. This is where it all drops away, where we can soak in the benevolence of reality, and feel the true relief of letting go of struggling.

It can only happen right here and right now. This here and now, not some other here and now.

Your only responsibility is to let go of your grievances against the present moment... no matter how you do it. And even that is not a responsibility... just a method, in case you are tired of suffering.

Edited to add:

I just received an email from someone who showed me that I could have expressed the idea of "loving the camel" a bit better. When I talk about the present moment, I mean just this bare moment. Just you, sitting somewhere perhaps, reading this. Maybe a cup of something to drink at your side. Just you sitting or standing, with the mind quiet. No stories about how things should or should not be. Maybe you hear a bird or a train or the sounds of a city. Just this. And then again, just this.

I'm not saying that someone should stay in a painful situation or martyr themselves in any way. I'm talking about noticing how painful it is to be running a storyline in your head. Dropping the storyline, or at least inquiring into whether or not it is true. Seeing that if you are pointing to something external, you are pointing in the wrong direction. The suffering is in the story.

I am not saying that it is necessary to be pain-free all the time, or to have some pollyanna attitude towards life, or to give up on your dreams. I am saying that if you want your dreams to come true, it's important to drop the storyline about how they aren't happening. It is a kind of faith or trust that the desires of your heart have been heard.

a mind that inclines to abandoning

I read that line in "Mindfulness, Bliss and Beyond," by Ajahn Brahm. It's an exquisite idea if you look at it from a meditative standpoint.

My mother was a person who suffered a lot of disappointment in her life. She was pretty neurotic and fearful, but she also conveyed to me something very important that has served me well. She taught me to avoid doing what she called "getting my hopes up."

Perhaps she didn't mean it the way I interpreted it, but I took it in the best possible way. I, like all of us incarnated in human bodies, have desires and hopes and plans and dreams. They arise naturally and I invest some of them with energy and others I let fall by the wayside.

The ones I invest with energy.... the ones I imagine and dream of and endow with a sense of happy expectation, are also the ones I know to abandon.

By abandon, I don't necessarily mean "give up on" but I know that when we want something too much what winds up happening is an inadvertent focusing upon the state of not having it. What you focus upon, you create. This is the magic of our minds. Yet the word "want" connotes a state of lack, and that connotation often reverberates more strongly in consciousness than its object and winds up being the reason that despite all your hopes and affirmations and focusing, things in your life don't get better.

So when I want something a lot, I imagine having it, and then I let it go. I go from a state of imagining having what I want, to a state of contentment with the way things are. It's pretty great. The pleasure of imagining followed by the peace of contentment.

The important thing is to notice how wanting something makes you feel in the present moment. Are you sacrificing the quality of the present moment to your dream? Is the dream making the present moment deeper and more wonderful to be in, or is it creating within the moment-point a sense of dissatisfaction with "the way things are right now." It should do the former, not the latter, if you want to change your circumstances.

When we are children and pretend-playing, the very act of imagining is wonderful, transporting. We don't compare the imagined situation with reality, saying, "but I'm not really a superhero," or "I'm not really a world famous ballet dancer," we just enjoy the experience of it and then abandon it when it's over.

In order to focus your intention upon creating a wonderful future in which you will experience a sense of deep value-fulfillment, you need to imagine that sense of fulfillment right now, in this present moment, and enjoy it. Bring the contentment home to "this." In truth, "this" is everything.

being the source of the dream

Life springs endlessly up through the focal point of the present moment. It bubbles up like an underground spring and appears here and now, radiating outward from each center.

If you feel around in your being for the source of the present moment—for the source of that bubbling spring of event-hood, it seems to be coming from the heart. If you feel for it, you can begin to sense it.

What is in the center of the spring is our experience of the present moment. As the event spring spreads outward from our experience of it, we interpret that as both space and time. But our experience is always best right at the very center of the spring... the present moment.

In that center of the present moment there is singleness and peace.

As events emerge, thoughts about them arise. If we follow the thoughts, we lose touch with the spring and its peace, but it doesn't ever cease to exist.

Some thoughts are so habitual that they become beliefs and they divert the stream like rocks in a river bed, completely distracting us. We accept them as part of the landscape, forgetting that they are just thoughts we've practiced over and over again. As a human race, a culture, a civilization, we practice many thoughts together so often and so well that they become difficult to discern as just thought, because they seem so solid. But once seen, they begin to dissolve.

A thought arises about something that you want—a dream you have about how life will be better when this something occurs. Ask yourself, "How does having this dream of a future make me feel in the present moment?" It's how you feel right now that determines what kind of manifestation your spring will bring forth.

If you are desiring something from your seat in the present moment and it's making you feel bad because you don't have it—that "feeling bad about not having it" is what you are projecting and is the very future you will experience.

If you want a future of contentment, focus on finding whatever contentment you can in your present moment. If you want a future of happiness, listen for the faintest melody of happiness in where you are right now and put your focus there. Find the tone of your fulfilled desire as it exists ever so slightly in your present experience and just appreciate. Appreciation magnifies whatever quality it focuses upon.

Notice when the desire for a future in which things will be different, creates within you a disdain for the way things are right now—unless what you wish to experience are increasing levels of disdain, of course, which is perhaps something you are interested in investigating. There's no right or wrong way to have a dream. We are not judged. Judgment is an artifact of the human dream that remains within the dream.

The present moment is always your refuge, your shelter, your source and your guarantee. As it bubbles up through your heart, you tint the water with colors of thought, emotion or awareness, and then experience the manifestation as it spins away from you.

fifteen years ago

I recently cleaned out my office and took home a stack of journals I hadn't looked at in years. Most of them record my daily attempts to stay awake during a series of challenging life events. My goal was to avoid making an already painful situation even worse by having ego reactions. Some of them are paraphrased from books I was reading at the time, but this was way before my blogging days, so I wasn't careful about annotation. If you recognize something feel free to call it out.

Here's one helpful entry I thought I would share with you:
"The only reason we resist the self is because we fear that it is hurting our chances of getting something—be it God, love, peace—whatever. But if you are standing in a place where the idea of getting is present, the idea of losing is also present, which means you are standing in the self."

And another:
"We do not have to dispose of or keep the contents of the mind. Neither boycott nor indulge."

One more:
"Only the self fears loss. Only the self feels incomplete. Only the self speaks first and incessantly. For the self there is never enough security. The disturbance you perceive as outside of yourself IS yourself. You are dominated not by life's events, but by the inner dialogue of endless associative strings of thoughts and reactive feelings. The only solution is inner silence."

Last one:
"The self believes that the present moment is robbing it of its future."

•   •   •

At that time I was keenly aware of the fact that the mind/ego/false self/human, whatever you want to call it, always feels incomplete. It feels temporary and endangered because, in fact, it is. And because it is the state of identification with the body, with all things physical, it believes that in order to establish its completion, it has to get. Getting, adding to the self, is its main goal. It gets relationships, money, houses, cars, enlightenment, credentials, opportunities, whatever. The self loves numbers. One is the loneliest number and all that. There is nothing wrong with this. It's quite a game! But identifying with it is painful.

On the other hand, your true nature has no concept of getting. Getting doesn't exist for it. Only being. It also has no concept of incompleteness or lack. It is absolutely fine with the present moment exactly as it is.

you can't get to yes

I was going to entitle this post, "getting to yes" but then I remembered! Not possible.

You can't move towards what you are. What you are is always there and has never changed. The only thing that is doable is to notice what you are not, and realize that you are identifying with thoughts and ideas that cause you suffering, and creating a self based upon them. Or let's put it this way—you can notice the "no."

Noticing the "no" or the presence of resistance within your mind and body, is not the same as judging that resistance or condemning that resistance or wishing that resistance would go the hell away. It's just noticing. Resistance is that ever-present human desire for this moment to be something other than what it is.

Fortunately, we have the magic of awareness. To be aware of something means to stand apart from it. In that action of becoming aware, your sense of "me" stops being created by the motion of the mind and starts being created by the stillness of the observer. It's a subtle shift, but if you pay attention you'll notice that within the motion of the mind is suffering, and within the stillness of the observer is peace.

Within both is a sense of self. One is a peaceful, content self, and one is an agitated, reactive self. Neither one is a permanent self. It's just that one believes itself to be a victim of external circumstances and the other does not. So one of these temporary selves is suffering more than the other one.

Most of us vacillate between these selves, losing our mindfulness and becoming solidified as a victim of the world, then recalling our mindfulness and remembering our option for peace. It's like we stand on the banks of a turbulent river and every once in a while we lose our footing and fall in, thrash about, and finally scramble back to shore to dry out and calm down. With practice, we begin to notice the tendency to lose our footing before it causes us to land in the river.

there is nothing to fear

The whole idea of failure is an error. Failure is the process of succeeding. Success and failure are so close to each other that, in fact, there is no such thing as failure. When a baby is learning to walk and it falls down over and over and over again, those falls are not failure. It's not possible to learn to walk without falling down. That's just the way of it. It is all part of the process of success...failure doesn't really exist.

J.K. Rowling was clinically depressed, contemplating suicide, living on welfare, grieving over her mother's death, divorced and alone with her baby, when she wrote Harry Potter. It was rejected by 12 publishers before being accepted by one who then auctioned it off to another publisher. The truth is that she has always been wildly successful... it just took her awhile to bring herself into alignment with that particular experience in time.

But here's the thing: neither state is a failure, and neither state is a success. There is nothing right or wrong with either state... being the destitute, depressed single mother, or being the billionaire author. All experience is valuable and worthy of love. Judgments as to value are fabrications of the human mind, the dream of being human.

Success already exists for you, and for everyone. So-called failure is the process of bringing yourself into alignment with it. It's like tuning an instrument. The untuned string is not a failed, tuned string. It's not possible to tune a string unless it is first out of tune. But in truth both the untuned string and the tuned string exist simultaneously and are of equal value. Equal value.

the blunt tool of language

Here in these bodies we can use various means to access different states that are natural to us, but obscured by the wear and tear of the physical hurly-burly. We can meditate and sink beneath the obscuring thought-matter or we can use language (teachings) to evoke new thought patterns—ones that are less opaque and allow the relieving truth to shine through.

Two really good, brief teachings that I like a lot are the concepts of letting go and letting be.

As with all things involving language, the definitions are not apparent in the actual words. Letting go, I learned a long time ago, is not something actually achievable. First of all, even if you think you can let go of something, the truth is that there is nothing "out there" for you to let go of. So it's kind of a tricky thing. You may think you are clinging to something—a person, a fear, a habit, a job—but in truth you are simply believing a thought pattern and creating a temporary sense of self around that thought pattern.

So in order to let go of something that is causing you pain, you have to first realize that the thing itself is doing absolutely nothing to you. It is your belief that you have to have the thing, whatever it is, that is creating the problem. Around this belief, whether it be that you have to have love, or have to have money or have to have enlightenment, has solidified a sense of self with which you identify. Letting go means letting go of the "you" that believes it has to have this thing—turning your back on it and walking away.

Letting go means enduring the anxiety and temporary feelings of unease that occur when you have no solid sense of self any more. When you've been clinging deeply to something and you turn your back on that clinging self, there's a period of "don't-know-mind" which can be uncomfortable. Eventually, this state of don't-know-mind becomes your best friend and when you feel it you heave a sigh of relief.

Letting be, on the other hand, is a steady state of mind that makes the periods of letting go less traumatic. When things become tangled and stressful in our lives, we tend to engage with them in knee-jerk ways that we believe will alleviate the stress and make the painful feelings go away. We say and do things while in a reactive mental state, which is always a bad idea.

Letting be means living with the feeling of discomfort until you can see it clearly. When you can see why you are uncomfortable it becomes possible to investigate whether the discomfort is based on anything real. You can follow the thoughts to their "worst case" scenario and see if in truth there are any circumstances in need of altering. Most often there aren't and interfering will only make things worse.

Letting be means that you lean back and allow what is happening to happen. You let it play out without assuming that your ordinary human mind understands the why of it, or the consequences that will come of it. Again, it's the don't-know-mind, but in this case it is something you step back into while observing appearances.

In letting go, you take your attention off of appearances altogether and walk face first into not knowing.

seeking, revisited

I had an interesting experience a few months ago. My credit card information was used fraudulently. The credit card company caught it right away and notified me that they'd stopped all activity on the card and that I'd be getting a new one in a couple of weeks. Meanwhile I should cancel all automatic payments coming out of that card and switch them either to the new one, for which I didn't have the number, or another one. Minor hassle... part of living in this time-space.

I was able to switch all automatic payments online pretty easily except for one. The cable company that provides internet to my home has perhaps the most third-circle-of-hell website I've ever encountered. Dead ends, links that don't work, long convoluted processes that end in there being no "submit" button, and so on. I finally managed to switch my automatic payments to a new card (or so I thought) and that was that.

Two months later I get a notice that my service will be "interrupted" unless I pay my bill, which is now two months in arrears. Of course, I thought I had paid my bill, but these things happen, so back I go to the website, feeling kind of pissed off, and I go through the whole routine all over again, enter a new card, and get to the final step of payment. On the screen it says "click continue to submit payment." But there is NO continue button. No button to click. Nothing. There's no way off the screen.

Then I notice a live chat window, so I enter the problem in there, and after a few more really aggravating exchanges with the agent in which she does things like tell me to watch the video they provide on how to pay online, she finally believes me and makes the payment for me, entering that card for my auto-payment. Fine. I'm angry about all this, but it's done and I try to put it behind me.

Then yesterday I get a notice in the mail that my service will be interrupted because... etc. The payment never went through. I get on the phone to the number they provide for "if you think this notice is in error" and of course there's no possibility of human contact, but I pay the exorbitant bill AGAIN, over the phone by pressing buttons in response to the robotic prompts.

Arrrggg. I haven't been angry in a long time, but these types of experiences, of which I've had several, lately, are pissing me off. And then suddenly it dawns on me. I am wanting things to be different from the way they are.

Ah, relief.

This is a very subtle point, so I'll try to make it as clearly as I can. What I'm talking about can be misinterpreted as resignation. Oy, this is the way the world is, what can you do? That's a victim stance. Not what I mean.

What I'm talking about is sitting with the texture and grit of whatever you are experiencing and not fighting it. Not demanding that it be other than what it is. Notice how the human mind always wants a certain kind of interaction. It always demands a certain type of pleasure, a certain type of diversion, a certain type of smooth, pleasing experience. It's very discriminating about what kinds of experiences it considers "okay." This is what all seeking behavior is, whether material or spiritual.

Who you really are has no such discriminatory nature. All experiences are interesting. There is no sense of demanding that things be other than how they are. I guess this could be called non-resistance, but I'd say that non-resistance is the doorway into the experience, and the experience itself is more joyful than that.

You might also call it forgiveness, which is another doorway into the arena of non-discriminatory experience but forgiveness has overtones that imply morality and this really has nothing to do with morality.

I think the quickest doorway into this experience would be Byron Katie's four questions and a turnaround. She talks about our crazy ideas that, in this example, the cable internet company and its website should be different from the way they actually are. This is how we suffer... by demanding that what IS, be something else.

The human mind is addicted to the idea of resistance. It believes that unless it resists the "bad" the "good" will not come. Yet the truth is that in the very moment that you stop resisting the discomfort of whatever situation you are in, the discomfort itself begins to fade and to open into another type of experience altogether.