Back in the 1980’s I was trapped, caught between a rock and a hard place. My head began to fill with frustration, pain, anger, bitterness, even hatred.
The key to regaining peace of mind came from studying (with my soulmate) the book by Norman Vincent Peale, published in 1952, “The Power of Positive Thinking”. In these pages, I learned lessons invaluable for a more productive daily life with the strength of faith and peace to sustain me.
I acquired the techniques of conscious choice to reject negative modes of thinking and replace them with positive thoughts, and embrace these new ways with alacrity and gratitude.
I acquired the almost magical ability to abandon unproductive habits and replace them with new constructive ways of coping. I doubt even Luke Skywalker possessed such effective tools!
I understood how to create an image of my future productive and happy self, so I could stop wasting my energy on merely being anxious about my need to gear up to change.
In these ways, I quit smoking after 33 years. I retrained to change my career not once, but several times. I began to work on being more non-judgemental, which meant that I could better tolerate and accept without murmur negativity from others in my workplace.
And I welcomed relief into my life when I quit my pointless running on the hamster wheel of hatred.
From the beginning, I recognised the future and the past are devoid of meaning and reality, because all goals, mine and as well as yours, are achievable by a steady focus on the core strengths freely available in massive unending abundance that come from loving to live in the moment.
For the life-affirming gifts I carry in my heart and mind today, after I left behind those days of darkness and fear on the treadmill of addiction to sorrow and self-pity, I am humbly grateful.
May you awake to believe you dreamed you were alive and truly know you are
We all come towards awareness of the Being nature of existence from such a huge variety of diverse start points.
Yours is from turning this wood into this instrument of music. Mine is from visualising on blank paper the flow of words from an unseen spring.
The common factor is in the way we ourselves, who are each our own anthropomorphs, are willing to be transformed during the entry into us of these Awarenesses.
Awarenesses they seed in us, and we can begin to observe their inception, their progression into places in us for which we have no precise definition.
And we suffer, are broken open, melted down, and recrystallised in the gradual timeline of the birth pains of every Awareness.
And then comes the dawning of the joys.
The joys, like the risen Sun above the Arctic Circle, the joys will not set any more, as it becomes apparent that there is no boundary and no distinction between ourselves as witnesses of the Being of existence and our lives in the alive living of it.
•❀Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ❀•
May your best dreams be rooted in earth, may they network with the sky.
May you awake to believe you dreamed you were alive and truly know you are
May you live as a dream exists – full of form, light, wonder.
Every day, many times a day, I stand at the doorway about to close the door. In the room is my spouse, my child, friend, acquaintance, friend of a friend.
It is perfectly possible that this will be the last moment we will be in sight and in earshot of one another, because the life we breathe in and the life our heart beats out like a clock of blood is fragile beyond our understanding.
What words of love, what signs of friendship, what commentary of appreciation can I leave behind me as I close that door?
Every time you take your leave of your nearest, your dearest, remember!
Remember to bless the moment of parting with a token of your love
When I don’t allow myself to accept my circumstances, conflict begins.
I put it to you, I have no need to experience frustration as long as my consciencious attention is fiercely focused towards observation of the fruits of the moment, with every one of my senses awake, tuned, alert, receptive.
There is nothing specifically prescribed to concentrate on. After all, where my body is located, it is surrounded by sights, textures, sounds, scents – an unending procession of the external stimuli of Realia!
I, or you, can engage in this close focusing now and then, if we like.
However, when I choose repeatedly to take the time to plunge myself into immersion of the sensory moment, then from out of this microcosm, I may be blessed to receive radical life-enhancements with the power to permanently change the way I perceive the quality of my life.
These are the slow-maturing fruits of microcosmic inspection. The sweetness they bring is so sublime, I overflow with joy and I simply have to share!
I know from my own experience there is an uncomplicated way to release joy and open the floodgates to love and peace, when I recognise that my mental images of the past and the future are illusions.
The distractions of frustration, fear and anger live in the unreal past and the impossible future. These products of misdirected attention are irrelevant and wholly superfluous to human requirements!
What validates this leap into a blissful state, where rushes of love chase away every last residue of fear?
Well, for a start, being intensely nose-to-nose with the absence of time in the flying moment is thunderingly awesome.
Here are the pleasures of non-attachment, where I cultivate my close attention, and it returns intensity of awareness back to me without locking any part of me into what I am doing with my directed attention.
Explanations about the pleasure of being released from the past and the future is not the thing. The thing is to be thankful.
Gratitude is the right reaction. Be grateful for release into lightness of heart. Be thankful for sudden intimacy with the giant world of intuition. Be in awe of the strange new ability to read hearts.
Flow in the moment helps self realisation.
In the moment when a fragment of birdsong triggers my smile, it triggers also my self love. The union of self with self is union with the whole of existence. What other respectful ways of being glad are there than the gladness of humility, awe and gratitude?
Boredom stems from ignorance of, or more kindly put, from a lack of attention to the expressions of bliss in material form continually manifest at my fingers’ reach, before my very eyes and all around me.
If I am travelling at night, I might suffer from the delusion that darkness contains nothing of worth, and so I do whatever I can to accelerate my removal from an experience I tell myself I don’t like.
What I am failing to do is look up and see the briliance of stars. I am failing to halt my footfall to listen to the awe of silence. I am failing to bring to mind the stories of those lives who dwell in the nocturnal.
Boredom is a cloak whose unwelcome weight, when its onset is detected, stimulates a search for what my senses can detect that fill me with wonder, awe and the very delicious delights of discovery.
Durdle Door? You can keep your Durdle. This insignificant Dorset door has all the excitement without the fame.
Three or four times a year, I like to travel the short distance from my home and come alone to stare at one side of the green door.
This was an entry to a pastoral past. They who opened and closed this door are crystal dust. The trodden green crush of them is bedded in the pigment which flakes with every season’s turn.
Behind this green un-Durdle Door is nothing. Perhaps scratched up parts of dry mouse nest. Maybe remnants of Red Robin and his song.
This is my side of the green door. It is a standing ovation to my blasted green age
The war the Brits call “Falklands”, and the Latin Americans call “Malvinas”, was going at full throttle.
Every street newsstand throughout Brazil and beyond attracted its own little crowd of free newspaper headline readers.
The day before flying from Heathrow, I had watched on the telly enormous crowds of flag-waving families and well-wishers giving the British troop ship HMS Invincible a hearty send-off at Portsmouth.
Here I was now in a row of three seats on an internal flight from Manaus, on the Amazon, to Rio. My wife sat in the middle seat. The middle-aged man by the window struck up a conversation with me.
As is usual in Brazil, after finding that I was not an American, this gentleman, who was a third generation German Brazilian, opened up to me.
He praised the Iron Lady for her defence of British territory. Like many people I got into conversation with in Europe as well, he also mentioned Winston Churchill.
I had had to cut short our trip, because I’d caught a respiratory infection in the jungle, and it was wiser to recover where we could get help at home.
Meanwhile, because powerful remedies like antibiotics were available over the counter at the time, I had taken a couple of horse pills on the recommendation of a pharmacist the day before I boarded this flight.
We finished our in-flight meal deep in conversation. I thought it kind and considerate of my wife that she exchanged seats with me so we could carry on our discussion about the War. It never occurred to me she saw the aisle seat as a safe escape route!
I explained to this man I had met by chance that human geographic designations of territory are arbitrary, artificial and are established for economic gain and domination.
I tried to show him how the point of view of Earth from low orbit confirms this.
I suggested, furthermore, he consider how history shows us blood has been shed in conflicts between these hypothetical entities we call nations.
By the time I got to chatting about how modern industrialised slaughter has spilled more blood than ever before, the conversation had taken a louder, adversarial turn.
My new friend took exception to my extreme and culpable lack of loyalty to Queen Elizabeth, Margaret Thatcher, Winston Churchill, my fellow citizens and the Good Lord.
The cabin crew had by then cleared away all the in-flight meals except ours. My wife noticed that the more heated our informal conversation became, the greater the distance the air crew put between us and them.
I am the meekest and mildest of men, more mouse than man under normal conditions. But the horse pills that had cleared my chest, had installed a pacing tiger where my inner mouse used to dibble.
We overflew the Amazon and disembarked to transit at Brazilia Airport. The gentleman claimed his bags to proceed to the exit.
The last thing I remember was my wife physically restraining me from lunging after the man as he shunted his luggage trolley, with its irritatingly creaky wheel, through the Nothing To Declare gate.
Back in Blighty, it is time for the ten year census survey in Great Littleton. After this close call in time of war, I chose to write HUMAN in the box for Nationality.
🕊️ The unregarded power between rejection and acceptance ❌
When I accept a friend’s smile, I am all at once with my friend. I cannot recall anything of the moment prior to the infusion into my being of the smile.
I so am overtaken by the oscillating wave of friendship immediately upon recognition of the smile, that there is no need to analyse or rationalise the small deep joy of this human connection. It is just joy.
In fact, I never do stand aside to look at this process. And I may not be able to, because it is a trigger at a primitive level of our gregarious collective human nature.
And yet something does exist between the seeing and the surrender to the seen.
It may only be the smallest glimpse of something. And it shines clear and pure and true.
The quality of the purity and human truth present in a transaction of simple friendship is of the same order as is striven for throughout human history and which is sung and celebrated and held in the greatest esteem by thinkers and artists, sages and leaders, from the furthest reaches of recorded time.
If I do understand any of it at all, I feel it is a reflection of primal power of the life force itself that I have witnessed in the smile shared between my friend and I.
E.E.Cummings, in this poem, makes contact with this primal power with the delicacy, as it feels to me, of the wingbeats of some vaporous cosmic butterfly …
may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old
may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it’s sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young
and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there’s never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile
The attainment of satisfaction is not so far out of reach at any given stage of your journey as you might think. That’s also the message of Apophatic Mysticism.
The removal of personal obstacles, a stasis of bliss (ecstacy even) is largely dependent on factors we all have very much under our close control, if we choose. There are many recognised practices which help us to offset or eliminate attachment of various kinds.
We can “do” non-dual ways of thinking and even “get” the fundamental ideas which help us to act with non-judgement, and discover that outcomes negative and outcomes positive have essentially equal value to us, regardless of how these present to us as subjective extremes. This merciful release from dependency on the “satisfaction” with life becomes turned around, when life lived fully and in the richness of the moment “lives” us.
Every single activity of the mind or body can be experienced with a passionate focus, with no regard or need for “outcome”. Which, being intensely lived in the moment, releases burdens of acquisition and the trappings of results measured by time past or time future.
I find it hard not sound like a steam engine, chuntering my words, to describe or transfer my own experience of these processes of surrender and show how there is easy access to an unshakeable and constant love of life, which in turn is grounded in all our deepest existence.
I now think I can trace back my own deliverance from fruitless striving after illusory goals. I was shaken out of my personal boundaries by my first, rather ecstatic, experiences of my self, subsumed wholesale and all on a sudden, into the eyes of my first few Biodanza partners. This marked the start of 2013, the Year of my Life.
The rush out of my entire selfhood and my entry, by consent, disembodied and without words, into the most sacred heart space of another shook me and created lasting fundamental changes in my appreciation of life and what I am doing in it.
These changes were at first devastating and incomprehensible. I even had no English vocabulary to describe what was happening. I had to learn so much from first principles. I read hungrily and learned a lot from Googling new words, like Non-attachment and Self-sabotage. A few Soulfriends, wiser and more travelled, shared their time with love.
What was happening with me was bewildering but undeniably beautiful, so I began to journal, to create a type of daily order from my emotional chaos. Journaling continues to be of great benefit. What I am composing right now is journaling.
I soon understood that my Apophetic Ecstasy had arrived, though I only stumbled on this technical term eight years later. I knew it was here to stay. The fact of its presence shows up as a constant feeling of being in love with no person or object of the love.
All my adult life, I have been fascinated by the mysticism and awe which so often accompanies the act of surrender.
Surrender here is me releasing my own will. This surrender can be a willful and willing acceptance and yielding to whatever else is occurring other than what I personally believe, think or want.
In the moment of release into such a state of surrender, acceptance becomes everything, and I see everything as containing and contained in sufficiency. A sufficiency where I want nothing, want for nothing, and Loving Kindness and Goodness follow me all the Days of my life!
Honestly, the veil is thin as thin can be between the “hard labour” we so often take to be our lot in life, and the permanent lightness of heart which relates to our innate and primal human state of being and which is available to everyone EveryNow
Postscript
I was surprised recently to discover much of what I have become aware of since 2013, as I negotiate these ripe orchards of newness, is described in scholarly detail in the book by Raymond Carl Sigrist, published by Infinity.com, titled “In love with everything – Apophatic Mysticism”.
From my personal perspective, the wanderer filled with wonder, Sigrist’s treatment of the subject skips over the transformative effects of the application of bliss in daily thought and action. The shifting ground of bliss welcomes my feet on my stepping stones to wakeful gratitude.
Love comes on the wings of dawn, ) Love flies into the face of fear ( Love beats all fear with one winged caress. I look skywards for love’s approach – My dusk is surprised by love’s dawning, because (
That which is overflowing with potential for the giver, urgently impels the giver to share, so making the potential evident to a receiver.
The natural urgency of giving is a transaction of graces and blessings.
The grace of the giving is transformed into the blessing by the gift.
The gift is at once unchanged and, in its recognition, it is bestowed with a little divinity.
The potential of life is in the naturally occurring laws by which an infinitude of relationships between constantly varying energies, solid and immaterial, interact.
This is interaction, ceaseless, without end, on a scale too huge to imagine, containing the mysteries of perpetual motion, creating synergy.
These synergies balance in the focus of our conscious mortal minds, and we say “Beauty”
When I see you, dearest Friend, with the question of your whole life, open without borders, in your eyes like a multi-petalled summer flower, my immediate answer, prompted from the single thought on my mind, the only word to arrive on my tongue, is “Love”.
If there is anything I want to say, if I want to find a framework for the words and the tone of the words that I have to say to a dear friend, I need choose only this. “I love you.”
Instead of looking into your expectant eyes, I do not say, “I love you”. I do not say it. No, we are not lovers, we are soul friends! Instead, I choose consciensciously to phrase all that comes from my lips as if I am uttering love poems, love lyrics, love songs.
Suddenly, the cadences and intonation as well as my words themselves come sounding out like the loudest morning chorus of birdsong on the warmest honeysuckle-scented airs of Spring.
I so cherish your beautiful heart.
This is the magic spell love can cast. To offer you only love in love’s name to the glory of the love that I see reflected in your heart without once making mention of the word love.
Love is explicitly what I identify myself with now. This has happened as a result of my careful and detailed enquiry into the questions, “What is my true unashamed public expression of who I am and what I am?”
When I see your reply to the question of your whole life is not in your words, I see a silent, eloquent picture of your unhidden heart. I read your heart in companionable silence.
This could be the end of the conversation. But it shows to me that in the silence of two-way communication is a holding of hands without hands – the simplicity of a shared gaze between friends.
Even without words, we are joined in the river, the stream, the flow of an ocean of ongoing alive exchanges between two compassionate hearts
Where I cultivate my close attention, and it returns intensity of awareness to me without locking any part of me into what I am doing with my directed attention.
Counterintuitively, doing nothing all summer long wasn’t so frustrating as you might imagine.
When I wish for something other than the status quo, when I don’t allow myself to accept my circumstances, the conflict of frustration begins.
I arrived home from my operation dog tired. All physical exertion caused unpleasant dramatic effects. So exercise was obviously something to avoid.
With that, fatigue held me back. Fatigue was more of a welcome than a hindrance, because I wanted to rest, to sleep. My sleeps so refreshed me, I kind of looked forward to being tired. This became a self-sustaining cycle of pleasant reward for giving in to sleep.
Everyone agreed it had been a good summer!
My daytime luxury was to sit in the sun in the garden for long periods of time. I’d photograph insects and flowers, snooze. And then photograph flowers and insects.
Knowing that I was limited to these activities, grateful I have no need of employment, and with no other obligations, these few things quickly became what I owned.
I strongly suspect there is no need for anyone to experience frustration as long as their consciencious attention is directed towards observation of the fruits of the moment.
I learned to work on this internal reward system when I was still an employee at work, most often performing to others’ orders at others’ set times of day.
The moment of my activity becomes the world of my engagement and so it becomes my engagement with the whole world.
With the most repetetive boring work tasks, I set myself miniature milestones to achieve. That way I competed for efficiency with only myself. Only I and nobody else rewarded me for reaching my own set targets as I worked through my day.
I had no need to compete with others at work. The fact was I had no time to look over my shoulder, while I was so absorbed in my keeping up with my personal best.
These principles applied to filling sacks with builder’s rubble, as much as to achieving sales targets.
This state of mind can come from fiercely focusing on what my mind is making of where my body is, with every one of my senses awake, tuned, alert and receptive.
There is nothing special or specifically prescribed to concentrate on. After all, where my body is located, it is surrounded by sights, textures, sounds, scents – an unending procession of the external stimuli of Realia!
I, or you, or any one can engage in doing this close focusing from time to time, if we like.
Radical life-enhancements that can permanently change the way I perceive the quality of my life derive from this style of applied attention when I choose to take the time to plunge myself into and practise immersion in the sensory of the moment, either by choice, or because some life event, such as illness or injury brings these choices front and centre.
In my EveryNow blog posts, I try to write about these fruits of microcosmic inspection. My motive is simply to share the joy and the sweetness they bring.
I know from my own experience, there is an uncomplicated way to release joy and open floodgates of love and peace, when I can recognise the distractions of frustration, fear and anger as illusory, irrelevant and wholly superfluous to human requirements!
What validates this leap into a blissful state, where fear has no existence and rushes of love flit and flutter about with me on stage in the moment? Well, for a start, being intensely nose-to-nose with the absence of time in the flying moment is thunderingly awesome.
Here we have the pleasures of non-attachment, where I cultivate my close attention, and it returns intensity of awareness to me without locking any part of me into what I am doing with my directed attention.
The pleasure of being released from the leg-irons of the Past, and the cheeky cheery turning of my back on the caverns of Future is hardly worth bothering to explain.
And explaining is not the thing. The thing is to be thankful. Gratitude is the right reaction. Be grateful for release into lightness of heart. Be thankful for sudden intimacy with the world of intuition.
Accept and thank my lucky stars for the oddness of being able to read hearts!
Flow in the moment helps self examination. In the moment when a fragment of birdsong triggers my smile, it triggers also my self love. The union of self with self is union with the whole of existence. What other respectful ways of being glad are there than the gladnesses of humility, awe and gratitude?
The View at 72+ 