Samuel Johnson’s dictum, When you’re tired of London, you’re tired of life, occurs to me.
What the Great Fellow glossed over is that he assumed we all receive life’s enjoyments as gifts from the external world – in his example it was London life.
Nowadays I can’t conceive of any momentary experience not enhanced by some sort of learning curve, all the way through my life to the end.
I ask you this.
What sort of person is it who constantly expects to learn new things on the road, and who is frequently ambushed by the surprising amount of stuff available to learn, provided that all senses are prepped and receptive?
One answer is it has to be a serenely untroubled and always available openness. It must be a lack of externally conditioned, self-obstructing barriers to a cat-like curiosity.
Have you noticed? When they both ramp up their attention, cats and artists have a thing in common: they narrow their eyes.
It is a feline, feral immediacy of sensory input, unfiltered by intellect, which is largely responsible for bringing me, my heart and my sacred spaces into contact with the EveryNow.
By now, after years of redirected attention to the minutiae of detail and to the absence of time in which details bathe, I have the capacity to hurl my awareness in there pretty much on demand.
Such is the sweeping nature of the changes that I have been overtaken by these last few years, since 2013, the Year of my Life.
By self-discipline, by making continual self-conscious choices over a period of years, is the most precious thing I seem have acquired a lack?
I lack the overlay or inlay of concept, of internally verbalised labels at the point at which my senses interface with objects in the world. Think cat.
I have been regularly applying choice. Namely, I choose in the first instant of sensory contact to tune in to the Thisness of things. My motivation to exercise this intensity of unblinkered enquiry has become habitual through a self-reinforcing positive feedback.
And how amazing is this “feedback” !
If I strive to melt Peter the Pilley away in order to let the fly, the flower, the star, the shining soul-light of my friend assume the entire arena of my awareness, then what?
What happens, with no reasoning, no intervening rationalisation obscuring the way, is that I am inescapably infused, like tea in boiling water, with love.
The essential truth, the nature, the living-beingness of everything is love. Oh, and peace-in-perpetual-motion as well, but more of that another time.
When I started my EveryNow blog in 2018, I began to reread and redraft every blog before publication to make as certain as I could they make sense to others and the ideas are offered naked and free of concealed meanings, obscure convoluted expressions, or other examples of my own muddled undisciplined thinking.
The application of this methodical analysis is pleasurable and stimulating, because results come thick and fast.
I tease out into the open the logical progression of my ideas, I replace fuzzy areas of meaning with highly precise alternative words or phrases. I turn passive verbs into the active voice. I use nouns in place of -ing suffixed gerunds. I simplify concatenated sentences by trying to reduce them to simpler shorter ones each with subject, verb, object. Shake-down like this lubricates meaning and clears understanding.
The main criteria I apply is to put myself in the ears and shoes of my readers. I test every phrase, sentence and sometimes every word against its possible receipt by me as if equipped with the ears and eyes of others.
I have good reason to take unusually potent delight in this role play.
Imagine me in my late teens and for most of my twenties. I was too self-conscious of the sound of my own voice, and even of my inner voice, to be able to comfortably remain in company or in companionship. As they left my mouth, the words I spoke returned not as an echo, but with an instant direct feedback. Words from me sounded disturbing, because I could only filter my understanding through my own understanding. I could not hear myself speak as others might hear me. If I imagined my words as they sounded to others, I would imagine a room full of heads swivel in my direction, effectively shutting me down.
I guess it might end up like this for a person in long-term solitary confinement. We are all of us first and foremost gregarious. The environments with the most damaging effects on our emotional and mental health are loneliness and physical pain. When there is only one voice to pay attention to, the inner voice compensates by taking precedence, because it substitutes itself for the lack of the company and conversation of other humans.
In my late twenties, various factors combined to reset to normality the harmonious and effective functioning balance of my attention between the significant and the trivial.
From the time around these healing, self-reconciling events, I can date the beginning of my reintegration with the world of life, love and productive work. I could say I rejoined society from which I had felt isolated, distanced, unable to comprehend. This marked the beginning of a sense of a gradually rising tide of joy and gratitude for life lived.
Before this it was living to love – amusing, mildly decorative, but shallow, ephemeral, lacking in lasting significance.
After this I was, and am, loving to live – broadly capable of sensing and reaching out into the search common to all human minds and hearts for spiritual, philosophical and essential meaning to the experience of being alive.
I see in this flower and in the faces of all flowers, condensations of nature’s beauty. I see clearly their powerful concentrated visible identities with no secondary or tertiary meaning or intention.
In the open flower is the face of existence, thisness, the Tao. With no axe to grind and no message to convey, the flower is composed in its entirety of the Gentleness of Being
I believe in the truth of what I see and say with all the fibre and iron will of my entire being.
And as I say it, I feel the absence of the intensity of my feelings as I am describing them, because my utterance, like the rose, is “I AM”, purely and simply, no more no less.
Without being asked, the pink flower contains all answers to more questions than exist in the known and unknown skies.
I can see in its impermanent magnificence the rose is a Library of Alexandria before that devastating fire
I remember so well playing in my red wool swim trunks among the “Stooks”.
This was in the lush arable Vale of Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, where the locals called these fresh harvested corn bundles Stooks. With the Bucks burr, the vowel was lengthened into a sliding diphthong /əʊ/, like the vowel sound in “know”.
Our Hazel Cottage is listed in the Domesday Book [1086 AD]. Mud and wattle walls nearly a yard thick. A bread oven in one wall. A barn extension where a donkey was housed. Until the early 1960s, we, like the other thatched cottage residents in this tiny No Through Road hamlet set around cow pasture, had no running water, no mains gas and no electricity.
Hazel Cottage, Sedrup Green, Hartwell, Bucks. Listed in the Domesday Book of 1086 AD
I was a little lad with sandals. The standing corn stubble scratched and made tiny bloody incisions in our ankles. We cheerfully ignored the discomfort.
Peter Pilley, Sedrup 1954
I and a couple of friends, children of the farm labourers, tried to heave these sheaves of sisal bound corn together to make a cosy “den”. It was hot work in the early 1950s summer. I must have been very young, because the stooks were almost too heavy to lift!
Gilly Osborne, Peter Pilley, Wendy Miller, ‘Splendid’ Graham. Sedrup Farm in the background
My mother was an accomplished painter in oils. Hanging on our wall today is her painting. I know that field well. I cherish it for its powerful childhood memories. It shows a field of such stooks after the huge great big noisy clattering harvester binder had passed.
The next group of farm workers would come with pitchforks to heft the stooks up onto a flatbed cart drawn by tractor.
Literally as happy as the day is long
At the impressionable age of 8, I was invited to climb up into the iron seat of a Massey Ferguson diesel tractor. I was shown how to keep the clutch depressed while the engine was idling. On the shouted signal, I was to let the clutch engage to let the wagon crawl to reach the next group of stooks. I corrected myself after a couple of juddering stalls.
My being coopted as driver was not simply a benevolent treat. No one watched over me to see I did it right, or to be “nice” to a kiddie. I released an extra pair of hands to load more sheaves. I guess this was one way the local children got a taste of “real” farm work.
I remember to this day (after 69 years) it was supreme fun. The next time I would be driving a motor car would be around a field at school in 1963. My Mum, when she heard about it, became quite anxious after the event. When we kids came home for tea from frolicking in the corn fields, our Mums had to pick from our skin the tiny long thin black Harvest Bugs. The bugs were biters, though gentle ones.
Happy-go-lucky summer 1954 Hazel Cottage in the background
Sometimes we’d take home leftover lengths of baling twine. In 1965, I had my first car. It was an old Austin A40 in a shocking state. I named it Gertie. I bought it from a schoolfriend for a fiver. I was able to securely re-attach its faulty windscreen using a few yards of this excellent twine!
New Austin A40 – Mine was an old banger
In the 1960s, the machines were Balers. They left heavy rectangular blocks of compacted straw strewn over the stubbly fields. They made up into impressive haystacks which looked like houses or castles.
My Dad and I in welliesWendy fielding Peter. Her cottage in the background. A giant elm tree, too.
Haystacks composed of stooks were also huge. They had the charming look of an unkempt dog.
Haystack of stooks dwarfs Peter P
More recently, and less picturesque, corn is harvested and the straw is compressed into giant cylinder shapes. They are left covered completely in black polythene all solitary on their empty fields.
One lumen is approximately equal to the amount of light put out by one birthday candle that’s one foot away from you. My Huawei P30 Pro can take a clear photo of a scene lit by one lumen. This fact let’s me assume no scene is beyond its low light capability. Nothing is uncapturable.
When unlit outdoor darkness prevails, however, I return to recall my west Wales country nightwalk in November.
The effect of placing one foot in front of another in pitch dark is to strip away all conscious processing of visual input, and enter that un-modern, uncivilised, unlit, unvectored, primordial space.
Here all mental activity is reduced to one cause and two effects, just as it is for all life in survival mode. Base animal instinct reactions take over.
Alone in the dark countryside there is only either no trigger, or one trigger which releases an Either Or response. These bypass thought. These occupy 360 degrees of visceral attention – hairs raised, breath bated.
When I was walking round Ysbyty Ystwyth, the slightest sound carried this message. On it all military training is built. I rejoiced to recognise it as belonging to me and my kin from well before I ever was born! Clear and loud and deep in my body it is, “Either it eats me; or I eat it!”
Become animal then, I am returned to my origin, forever changed. Respect is due to the universal drivers of survival
Through a sequence of good luck, I salvaged and kept this Czech lead glass crystal doorknob during ten house moves and over 50 years.
It was fixed to my parents’ bedroom door. The slanting rays of the afternoon sun were diffracted into spectral rainbows, just as they are in my photo today.
I must have been 6 or 7 years old, when I stood facing these vivid primary colours for the first time. I was alone in the flat. I remember moving my head slowly to let these extreme pure colours, one after the other, into my eye and so directly into my receptive youngster’s brain.
The explosion of sensory overwhelm transformed into something I was able to understand much later as an elemental transcendental experience.
These colours, even to my ancient adult eyes today, appear to me like the stuff of supernatural science-fiction. They have an unearthly, exquisite beauty. At the same time, they are most observably real as well as incomprehensible, outlandish, utterly indescribable intensely private personal experiences.
I can easily date from that moment till now my perennial search for all and any transcendental experiences to this first childish encounter with the wonder of sunlight split into its constituent rainbow of colours.
Reason and reasoning set limits to the transmission of my experience of lived bliss.
The words and concepts academics use often stand like screens shielding the reader from an intuitive appreciation of non-duality, non-judgemental views, non-attachment, or unconditional love.
It has to be so, if they are to satisfy the questions people put to those who understand.
The bliss of existence in the full arc light of its own being defies analysis. True, it yeilds a portion of its omnipresent magic to descriptions of what it is not.
The questions people ask of meaning are like cars run out of petrol overtaken long ago by answers which never needed questions to attain motion!
in my EveryNow blog, I avoid cause and effect, question and answer, meaning extracted from hard fact. I mine for magic, not meaning.
In EveryNow, if I am able, I play with the elementary particles of awe that whizz so fast, they look to produce a steely curtain.
As I invite closer and closer approach, it is seen only as a diaphanous veil of excited curiosity through which I invite the brave to walk, dressed in fool’s costume, with furled supersonic wings of angels
While I am out and about on my own Chatting to Things is there magic to be found in an intimate meeting with a stone or a flower along life’s way?
There is a kind of self litmus test that I sometimes do when strolling out. It’s similar to seeing if the power monitor light is lit.
I look into my soma, and I check over how my body is responding to an appreciation of a curve of stem, the stimulating sight of a striation of petal, the pleasurable noise of a whirring flick of sparrow wings.
I ask, am I melting inside like a teenager in love? Does my next breath hardly dare to arrive? Do I obviously desire to smile without any initiating movement in my lips?
Sick or sweet, elevated, neutral, sullen or despondent, I am finding that Love is present EveryNow.
That is how it is. That is how I know it. I am ten times ten thousand per cent alive, just as is everything and everyone, sight unseen
The time is ripe to abolish singleton power. We had success for millenia when small scattered agricultural communities chose reliable people of trusted integrity to lead their decision making and to speak for all to neighbouring communities.
The time is overdue when systems of democratic process adopt flatter, more immediately accountable, group-rule management on behalf of the groups who place them in authority and who place their dependency in their hands.
One person one vote, Yes.
But “No” to handing total executive control to one person for howsoever short a time.
Human ingenuity and research and resourcefulness have developed and continue to develop amazing tools to provide for our comfort and health in ways that are sustainable.
Human frailty, fallibility and unpredictability under pressures of responsibility have proved and continue to prove terrifyingly catastrophic indicators of long term unhealthy development of worldwide humanity.
What benefit can any of these persons offer our descendents, if today we carry on allowing even a tiny number of ignorant and ill-intentioned leaders to do irreparable damage to our planet’s ecosystems on a planet-wide scale?
It’s okay to rebel. No complainant can carry legitimacy, if every one of us does not in everyday life think, do, say, or promote what brings about change for the general good
There are so many layers to the exercise of choice. I can choose! That is a first. I can choose to go. That’s an adventure beginning. I can choose to go with the flow, to disturb nothing when I arrive, to be one among the passing breezes.
And I can choose to know my footfall is noticed by no one and nothing at the shores of time, like my smile to myself in the dark just before sleep overtakes my sore heart!
It’s Zen-like. When I step back from the sharp end and I choose to grasp at nothing, with the careful and compassionate exercise of choice, in the end peace arrives.
Peace takes up residence at my head and feet. I know it’s present, because it loudly makes zero demands of space or time.
As I stand at the sandy shores of peace, do I know if I am the one who watches the ripples rippling? Am I the ripples? My heart cannot be doing with such questions, when it is rippling with love unending 🕊️
The blueness of sky simply releases in me and in my fellow family of humans an abundance of unconditional gratitude
COLOURS OF MY GRATITUDE
VIOLET is on the edge of the spectrum visible to humans. After and before the electromagnetic spectrum we humans know as “visible” exist vast energy-matter-probability fields we can visualise as our home, the Universe.
My gratitude is VIOLET for daily and constantly recognising my place in the Universe as a valid and valued entity gives me my identity, reminds me of the vital necessity for humility and helps me to keep my integrity in perspective and in balance with my aspirations.
My heart, my body and my mind, in that order, are my three best friends. My gratitude for my intuition is INDIGO. Indigo is near the limits of my human visual capability.
Intangible, formless and shapeless are my abilities to know without being told, to foresee without a person to guide, to read the heart of another without one word being exchanged, to imagine with no limits of any kind, internal, external or temporal. My gratitude for these gifts and graces is Indigo
My gratitude for being able to speak, be heard and understood is BLUE. Like the watery moisture on which all life depends, blue reminds me that life speaks through our thoughts, words, songs and stories. It reflects our identities on this Earth, from which we are formed and to which we all return.
GREEN! I am grateful for the ever visible reminder that life begins with growing things. Green grass, trees, seaweed, moss offer up their living aliveness to all eyes with no preconditions and no questions. Their greeness generates unquestioning love in my heart. The flow of energy from the cycles of green things growing makes me humbly grateful.
YELLOW is the colour of my gratitude for the harmony in my conscious decision-making.
When I remember how valued, loved, wanted, nurtured, nourished I am by ancestors, loved ones, family, friends and all of Humanity, I experience a falling away of disturbances, such as fear, anger, frustration, impatience or confusion.
Negative emotions flow contrary to life’s natural flow of blessings. Yellow is my gratitude for the falling away of the restraints of negativity when I touch into and activate my own loving kindness
ORANGE is my gratitude for children and their existence as reflections of the universal desire for the continuance of the flow of life.
I am a creature of desires. I recognise I am one pixel of humanity. My humanity recognises how my identity is constituted as one active cell in a membership of cells. My balance preserves and maintains my life and my life is made meaningful with the blessing of my offspring. Those of my fellow humans serve to justify and validate my existence, too.
Whenever I go deep into my being, deep RED rises in me. My body, my bones, my soma, my blood, but mostly my blood and flesh, come to my awareness.
I experience a recognition of red in gratitude that this is my blood, and with my recognising, I hug my fleshly self, and quite spontaneously, I am boundlessly grateful to be alive in a beautiful ocean of life!
BLACK is the outline of the holographic visions I summon up at will when my spirit takes wing. From these unlikely ponts of departure, from out of nowhere, my magician mind can engender images on the wheeling whirling stage of my creative wishing!
As I dance, I reach up into purple skies and with both hands I draw down nebulae, galaxies and whizzing showers of exotic particles to partner with me!
I ask the horizon, and the horizon beams to me gold and silver crepuscular rays, jewelling the scented wavecrests from here to forever.
I say, “Come clouds, burst into rainbow coloured music, and shower the fields of joy with flower petals of blue and white” and so it is.
And so it is! My freedom to choose from all the world’s libraries of Gratitude brings me bliss and ecstacy in uncountable plenitude.
~ Love’s presence EveryNow makes no demands on us. The blue of sky is simply blue. What blueness triggers in me and in my fellow family of humans is unconditional gratitude
🟢 Meditation on Awarenesses of Acceptance and Sufficiency ⚪
These are awarenesses, resources of great value, that I am unlocking more and more on my Journey.
In seeking to embrace these, I am inspired by the example of a friend, whose startling quality of compassion in action and word has made me strive to understand the source, the better to emulate and assimilate this living spirit of compassion.
I see much value in the practice of Acceptance. Acceptance smoothly paves over the crevasses of treacherous impulse to blunder and bluff.
Daily, daily, I am in confrontation.
These are like great stirrings, as my hot indignation coming upon a selfish arrogant owner who is letting his dog “worry” swans.
Or these may be small stirrings: a person whose relationship to me commands respect, yet whose insistent manner rouses an aggressive response in me.
My responses stem from my self-regard blinkered from and blind to the life I share with people around me.
Acceptance is tearing away my blinkers. It’s me choosing to reach up to a panoramic viewpoint, consciously remaining exactly where I am, but at the same time giving myself the gift of the widest possible perspective at my location.
Once I arrive there – and I can choose to arrive in a flash – I am immediately reduced to my true size relative to “where I’m at”, and so I am released!
I am released from confrontation.
In my eyes, Acceptance is an unwavering loyal friend, as I walk hand in hand with my other awareness – Sufficiency.
If I calm myself and allow myself to come into closest connection with some external event, it can show me clearly and directly a total, utter and complete satisfaction – there can be no outside of ‘Sufficiency’.
Sufficiency is the time from the outside to the still-point centre of anything at all.
Sufficiency is the end contained in the beginning.
When there is no longer a fear of death, the THISNESS of bliss is understood as Sufficiency in itself.
Sufficiency is Love’s second gift. The first is immeasurable presence.
Sufficient is a living beating newborn heart, a rust encrusted pencil sharpener, the fury of blind rage reboant, the fractal three of clover, the pale blue dot seen through Saturn’s rings.
It suffices with a soundless extreme implosion of perfection not to know, not to have been present, never to have loved, never to be more than only somewhat…
It is my awareness of Sufficiency which links me directly to the sum of all joys.
Any joy of any sort piercing the living moment is sufficient.
If I go out and about with a pocketful of forethought, and if I encounter a delight, I need not let it enter me and then pass me by.
For example, I may be kissed, and as I stop taking breath, I let myself feel all the breaths I have ever breathed contained in that kiss.
I do not think, “This is a kiss”. A kiss which knows itself to be a kiss will instantly self-destruct and disappear as completely as if it had never been.
The treasure awaiting my discovery in any experience is made suddenly visible by my inborn ability to allow its inherent quality of Sufficiency to overtake both it and me.
Every such wholly-lived experience is so naturally powerful just because it arrives in my life carrying its own tiny share of the cosmic Big Bang.
For me, that presumed Singularity is where time, space, matter, co-exist with love. This is where we came from and where we will return.
Sufficiency is the end contained in the beginning.
Sufficiency may be said to be without form, because it allows for all potential outcomes from void.
If I can only stop trying to dream, I can awake to find I am being dreamed by my dream.
The naked flesh of humility is clothed by sufficiency.
Awareness of Sufficiency has more gravity than its own mass! It is the cornerstone of Acceptance.
Acceptance extends, as does Humility, as does compassion, as does peace, indefinitely, infinitely.
I am bursting to tell you that an opening into an understanding has appeared to me. It has made things much less complicated. It has removed shed-loads of stress and taken away my false sense of obligation to myself and others.
I began journaling daily from my year of heart awakening in 2013. The collected curated posts began to form into my EveryNow blog on WordPress in 2018. The urge to “share the love” spurred me on and on to add more and more to EveryNow.
In November 2019, my mortality tapped me hard on my shoulder with a heart arrhythmia. My heartbeat suddenly went up to 162 and stayed there.
Whatever else might be about to happen to me, I knew I wanted to preserve and protect EveryNow as my legacy, my personal expression of my love of life. So while I waited my turn for surgery, I threw money at Facebook in order to extend and accelerate the geographic readership of my blog.
I created my Facebook page “EveryNow”. This form of advertising broadcasting has had some effect. A few tens of thousands have seen EveryNow who would never have known about it.
My troubling medical disturbance was mercifully cured, completely eliminated, by a small, simple, short procedure in January 2020.
I saw relatively huge numbers of paid for “hits” on EveryNow, tens of thousands of them, compared to my ordinary Facebook likes in single or double digits. I am struck, in truth I am thunderstruck, by the complete absence of engagement from any of them, in Europe, the United States and the UK. Although I have had no dislikes, I received no likes and no comments.
What does this mean for comprehending the behaviour of my new audience? And what does this great indifference say to me, and tell me about my attempt to make ripples, plant seeds, create new webs of connection through the beloved child of my heart, EveryNow?
With my own online presence, I continue to see others, present like me, “Sharing the Love” . My having joined them enables me to see what I am trying to express and present more ‘in-the-round’. I can take a wider perspective, and be more objective than when I started out online.
I understand more than ever that my on-line presence, which has been virtually daily since 2013, is on the scale of one fish in a planet-wide ocean of fish. Add to those fish, all the fish in rivers and lakes, and I can easily visualise my self-image of Fish-Man-Me to the correct scale. Infinitesimally small.
It’s gratifying that my blog shows signs that it’s just begun to reach a critical audience mass where the audience is growing without my adding new blog posts. One or two per week are seeing my blog posts. Look no hands! New followers are following from the old.
I imagined readers would report to me their reactions and new conversations might grow wings of inspiration and new communion.
In short, I reckoned that I have something of value, that I am saying something significant, and that there are people I don’t yet know who want to read more about what I am saying.
Every one of these assumptions and basic premises have no basis in fact!
My words are not set to catchy pop melodies, my ideas are not the stuff of viral jokes which spiral up the charts on fire, like Catherine wheels in the sky.
My words are truths clad in pastel colours. They arise from identical wellsprings of humanity as the emotions of any other person.
What I report on is one presence among all the other presences. The main difference is that I happen to be broadcasting it. This is no cause for others to sit up and take notice. It is hardly a reason for others to open one eye to me. After all, as I never get tired of saying, “Love is present EveryNow”.
If my art consists in saying I am as human and as alive as you, this is sufficient for the moment in which my words and images interact with another person. Much more importantly, it shows that this is amply sufficient for me also.
Here is the fork in the road. I have two choices according to what I think I have become.
My first choice is, I could choose to try again to enlarge EveryNow’s audience by financing more Facebook advertising. It can cost as little as one pound per day, and I am able to monitor the results closely.
By doing this, I can focus on the urgent calls of love that my heart, ears, eyes and mind shout out at every turn and step on my daily path. I can decide to completely devote my resources to give priority to the all-consuming feelings of urgency in the call to love that I find is so strong within me at all times.
One of the top attributes of this call to love is unabating newness. My emotional responses to external stimuli seem to react as if everything is continually new, everything is happening for the first time. This counterintuitive, even downright illogical, highly receptive ‘hyper’ state contributes such a lot to my desire to share the love. I do recognise it. In some form or another it’s a state of Grace.
Gradually, step by step, since this awakened state came about in 2013, I have been prompted to acknowledge to myself the fact of my new 24/7 condition – so akin to bliss unshakeable – because of the mirroring I have received from those close to me whose integrity and honesty I respect.
In parallel to this broadening acceptance of who, and more significantly, of what I am, my own self-compassion, my self-love has grown up to increase and become real too.
Here is an example. The point arrived some time in 2020, when I fully understand my fear of death is fear no more!
A portal opened for me in 2013 and it has never closed. I found a vehicle to offer to other people what I believe is most unusual and precious about what is happening on the other side of that magic door. It is the EveryNow blog. That’s why the Blog seems to be the bandwagon to leap onto!
My second choice is, I can step away from that image of me as one fish among trillions. I can shy away from the urge to increase, embellish, emblazon and enlarge my shadow under the sun. I can accept the concept of my membership of the Swarm of life. I can view my life as a Pixel of Humanity.
From the moment I fully understand what it means to be a Pixel of Humanity, I fully arrive at a place of pure acceptance, and purest peace, too! I know the joy of being simply alive, sentient and sensual, and my acceptance that this disarmingly exquisite experience of mine, of loving to live, equates to that of any other being, great or small, sentient or not.
I hardly find it necessary to differentiate between the ecstacy I feel when an empathy moment arises that lets me savour my intimate proximity to a pebble, a small stone ‘in the flesh’, never mind the delight of meeting with another loving, living being, animal or vegetable.
So what’s it to be? Here’s the thing. After I have made the all important distinction between the quality of love and the quantity of the qualities of which love is the bearer, I no longer want or need to try to grasp at the latter, because the former shows itself to me as so comprehensively sufficient.
From the moment I unreservedly accept that my voice among many voices praising and extolling love is like a summer flower in a gigantic flowering meadow, every thought, every emotion is stripped of layers of meaning and becomes quite suddenly Sufficient.
When my flower, my soul is not here any longer, when it comes to the end and it melts into the earth it rose from, it will remain as one of the myriad expressed forms of love forever
Evil arrives packed with the concepts and structures of its own downfall and failure.
Evil will always be present. Our preoccupation is not to banish what cannot be eliminated.
Ours is to bang the casseroles loudly from the roof tops, bring burning sticks into dark caves where evil lurks, and by so doing set in motion the train of fears which will crash and burn the evil men do
A friend may answer the question like this, “By being more present – for others – and in the course of this, for myself.”
I say a life more heart-centered in the terms described, “for others”, may derive from an imposed, expected, socially acceptable requirement.
I didn’t seek to live my life from the heart. It happened that my heart was revealed to me, in a sudden and shocking way. This was mediated through the extraordinarily powerful joining of prolonged eye-contact one-to-one, during wordless partnering in Biodanza.
I was briefly invited to share with another person our most sacred innermost spaces where the heart dwells. This can elicit a response in both people. I saw the shining integrity (non-judgemental, undifferentiated wholeness) in the soul of another. I saw the purity of the shine which the soul emits.
During those same shared moments, I felt my identity melt away. It became airy, then transparent. I felt dizzy, as when there is a sudden absence of old familiar coordinates to rely on. I teared up, because what I was seeing clear as daylight for the first time were these fine human characteristics. Integrity, honesty, and trust.
The greatest of these is trust. So much of the foundations, scaffolding and structures of functional society and of the wholesome individual are based on trust. Where there is trust, hope, growth and love can flourish.
I felt the avalanche of an emotion which was not love for another person. It was non-attached love. Love not disembodied at all, but grounded, real, rooted deeply and from time immemorial. I did not fully recognise it at that time (early 2013).
What I later grasped was that I had touched into, or received, a taste of the original life-force which keeps my life alive and guards both itself and myself with the power that comes from the place where I was born, and to which you, I and we all are returning, yes, each at our own pace, but as one human Tribe of sentient beings.
It has a well-known effect, this shared time of eye-gazing. Only it so happens that I was at a threshold when my heart, which I had been cloaking from even my own view for 66 years, shone reflected back to me from the heart of another. I was not “blown away”. I was literally blown open.
Firstly, I’m lucky that this awakening occured at all. Many may live and end life without this sort of revelation of the one-ness of all existence. This vision of one-ness is too powerful to frame in words. It is to be experienced, to be lived. It’s like electric current present in a copper wire. I know it’s there. Once my hand touches the wire, the shock through my body transmutes my knowledge into pure experience.
Secondly, my heart remained and remains open. My personal impression is that a heart opened can never fully close again. Some may arrive in a space which is heart-centric, abide there for a while, and then in some way or other they deny, discount or disregard their experience, simply because they lack sufficient first-hand knowledge of the life of the living heart of life.
I am incredibly lucky on two counts.
After all, when living is and always has been plain sailing from day to day, what useful purpose can be served, disturbing the expectation of the routine, by placing a hand on a live wire? I thought I knew what ecstacy is. It is like a cause and effect, isn’t it? And when the cause is absent, ecstacy vanishes.
My ecstatic experience of being alive does not depend on an external cause. For a long, long time I had been seeking to understand what causes ecstatic experience. I made strenuous and continual efforts to get under the skin, to get into the mind, to attempt to MELD with the living aliveness I see is present in every other life form around me. This process of enquiry resolves itself by reforming itself into a process of self-enquiry.
How is it possible that I am both alive and life is living me?
I am alive and life is living through me as well as in me. This is sufficient cause to be swirling, pulsing with the ecstacy of life lived all of the time, day and night, in fullest possible awareness.
I am alive and not dead. This alone warrants lusty songs of gratitude. Yes, I am grateful I am not dead!
My heart is beating. It is beating like every heart that is, was, and will be. This force that keeps the beat from embryo to this very moment is not mine alone. Mine is a share of the same life force whose origins are traceable along the whole route through scientific investigation (and common sense) to the Big Bang
🟢 Meditations on Awarenesses of Acceptance and Sufficiency ⚪
I see much value in the practice of Acceptance.
Acceptance smoothly paves solid ground over my treacherous impulse to blunder and bluff. Such responses stem from my self-regard blinkered from, perhaps fearful of and wilfully blind to the life I share with people around me.
Acceptance is tearing away my blinkers of self-regard.
Acceptance is me choosing to reduce my true size relative to “where I’m at”, and so I am released!
Acceptance releases me from confrontation, spite, doubt, confusion. Above all, I am released from the need to hide from others.
Acceptance of who I am, without precondition, with no judgement, opens me to self-love. Self-love may be timid, shy, inclined to spend time waiting. Self-love welcomed, accepted, is an invincible ally. Self-love will glory in reminding me of the mutually shared love story between my heart and me.
Acceptance is an unwavering loyal friend, as I walk hand in hand with my other awareness – Sufficiency.
Sufficiency is the time from the outside to the still-point centre of anything at all.
Sufficiency is the end contained in the beginning.
There can be no outside of ‘Sufficiency’.
Sufficiency is Love’s second gift. The first is immeasurable presence.
When there is no longer a fear of death, the THISNESS of bliss is understood as Sufficiency in itself.
Sufficient is a living beating newborn heart, a rust encrusted pencil sharpener, the fractal three of clover, the pale Blue Dot seen through Saturn’s rings.
When Sufficiency arrives with a soundless extreme implosion of perfection, I am surprised it’s completely enough not to know, not to have been present, never to have loved, never to be more than merely somewhat…
It is my awareness of Sufficiency which links me directly to the sum of all joys.
Any joy of any sort piercing the living moment is sufficient.
For example, I may be kissed. At that instant, all the breaths I have ever breathed are contained in that kiss.
I do not think, “This is a kiss”.
A kiss which knows itself to be a kiss will instantly self-destruct and disappear as completely as if it had never been.
The treasure awaiting my discovery in any experience is made suddenly visible by my inborn ability to allow its inherent quality of Sufficiency to overtake both it and me.
Every such wholly-lived experience – no matter if it feels bad or good – is so naturally powerful for the simple reason that it arrives in my life carrying its own tiny share of the cosmic Big Bang.
For me, that presumed Singularity is where time, space, matter, co-exist with love. This is where we came from and where we will return.
Sufficiency is the end contained in the beginning.
Sufficiency is without form, because it allows for all potential outcomes from void.
The naked flesh of humility is clothed by Sufficiency.
Awareness of Sufficiency has more gravity than its own mass! It is the cornerstone of Acceptance.
Acceptance extends, as does Humility, as does compassion, as does peace, indefinitely, infinitely.
If heightened sense of connection to all aspects of existence were sufficient all by itself, then my life and the entire caboodle would simply be a one-dimensional affair.
However, this experience of intensity is so myriadfold and multidimensional, it wells up, overflows the restricted borders of my own body and mind, so I have no choice but to share, and use every ounce of the strength of my living being to share and share it well.
I do reach out with my limited means of expression and with my words. These are so approximate to the task.
By these acts of core communication I confirm my humanity, my self-respect, and I try to make my own animal dignity an acceptable example among my fellow beings.
The View at 72+ 