If Time’s prime quality is beginninglessness and endlessness, if Time’s beginning and ending are immeasurably over the horizon of Human instruments of calculation, then it is true to say Everlasting Time collapses as a contradiction in terms.
When Time in its supra-Human vastness and all-encompassing inclusivity is considered as being the concatenation of eternity moments, does it not retain a meaning of taste, sight, sound, even of touch as well, for you and for me?
So here we are, Delicious! There is no “Glass half full; Glass half empty”.
The glass is.
I see neither heaven nor hell, no duality. I see the temporary coalescence of the me I call myself in the same eternity as you.
To sum it up, good Friend, you are a beautiful concatenation of glowing moments of the infinite, just like me.
Whenever I hear someone’s story of their 360° round trip on these rivers of tears, I feel a mix of compassionate pain and frustration at their unnecessary journey.
My gut says, “It ain’t necessarily so!”, because it puts me in mind of those circular journeys of solitary despair I knew so well.
I am a soul filled with a joyful heart. I am blessed with this grace because my heart has beat to its own time, while I lived and breathed through suffering.
I must state my position.
Many years I spent with my heart uncomprehendingly engaged in a mood of gloom. I lived close to the edge of the world. I could only grieve for the beautiful security of how things were, because I had lost contact with that most natural of gifts that all sentient beings share – to love to live in the flow of the present moment.
This flow of the lived living moment is the dance of life we can watch on any street corner all the world over, where children play, yell, and enjoy their own company.
The will to live – that resource of legendary power – knows no past or future. If I live in the fullness of this present moment, I know nothing of any “threat” to my existence, because a threat can only exist in the context of the future-in-the-past.
Similarly, if all I am is joy-of-present, I shall have no care for the past. The reality available to innocent babies and to all young sentient living beings is reality both all-encompassing and intensely personal, exactly as the Universe is both personal and vast.
This reality is a self-awareness welded to and bonded with the will to live.
For the new-born, so for our grosser adult selves – we have an imperative to survive. Survival is the expression of our dependence on billions of iterations of our ancient genes in the moment-to-moment.
Mercifully, survival is maintained by autonomous life systems. The “test” – that all-out awful emergency – is rarely handed over to us that we shall be obliged to take full responsibility for our survival.
The continuum between life and death, the fulcrum of existence, is as a magnificence. A magnificence removed from the tick-tock of time, contained in and available to us in the Grace of Present Here-and-Now.
In my late teens, before I ‘dropped out’, I searched for and found a precious union. I cleaved to “haeceity”, to the THISNESS of things. It hardly matters here what association this had to mainstream thought, the important fact is that this understanding of the essential nature of reality remains with me still today.
This found communion with the simplicity of “What is” is my bedrock, my source of strength, healthy well-being, and healing. It is also my ever-available portal to the most sacred space in the heart containing the source of endless peace and love, present in us all and available to us all, from which we come and to which we all return.
The ability to approach and become contiguous with the uncomplicated bliss of “What is” literally saved my sanity and on occasion my life.
After this, in my lost years (20 to 25) I became troubled with abnormal mood fluctuations, and was dependent on pharmaceutical and hospital support. My withdrawal from society caused much anxiety and pain to my family and friends. My parents did all they could to help me, though at times they feared for my safe future.
Arguably there have been several early-life traumas which predisposed me to this. I have been privileged to revisit my Inner Child, and I spent invaluable hours – under direction of my Shamanic Healer here in Bournemouth where I live now – in precious, if at times painful, discovery of the selfless love of that little boy.
The small boy-child I was took it on his own advisement to loyally support me during my early years trauma. I see now I owe a sacred debt of gratitude for his compassionate and unconditional love which ultimately made possible my release from early trauma.
With the dominance of low mood during those years, I lost my former ability to connect to the flow of the present moment. It felt like a bitter-sweetness, a sorry addiction to sorrow, much like a drug. For extended periods of time, probably prolonged by tranquillisers, this was my emotional home.
Mental states at unnatural levels of modulation had determined that I ascribed meaning to both thoughts and situations which in “logical reality” hold no more significance than the superficiality of the fleeting moment.
Here is my understanding of something central to the way we can lose our firm hold on the balance of our mental health.
An enormous burden of energy is required to deal with the trivia of day-to-day living as if they are issues of crucial importance. We maintain a healthy working equilibrium most of the time without much conscious thought.
We can be well served if we can be made to see from an early age the value of living “in the moment”. With the knowledge of these practices (living mindfully) comes the ability to apply personal choice to the management of an individual’s state of mind.
If we have prior understanding about how much importance to give to our thought patterns, we may be equipped to make choices in good time, when we are still inclined to seek help.
The starting-point when a person begins to regard the trivia of day-to-day living and their accompanying thoughts as if they are issues of critical importance, could be a jumping-off point into spiral, nonlinear thinking and decision-making.
From this superposition of the minutia of trivial thoughts on the conscious mind it is not far to go to arrive in the insoluble confusion of the unknown.
Then comes Chaos – a total loss of the ability to assume responsibility for one’s thought and actions.
The problem that got to be crippling for me was that for a time I lost the objective ability to recognise superficiality for the extraordinary gift it is – the delightful sparkling flow of the fleeting moment.
This led to overwhelming feelings of banishment from the world of other people, who I observed as enjoying superficial speech and actions unperturbed by states of hyper self-consciousness.
I now believe that there is a common denominator underlying the pain and helplessness of mental health sufferers. It is a common factor also for those who have tried with all their might to reunite with their sense of belonging in the world.
Without co-ownership of self, and without some sort of recognition of the THISNESS of the existence we all share in common – from the state of being of the humble Lacewing, to the imperturbably powerful outpouring of electromagnetic radiation in the Cosmos – peace of mind, communion with one’s own heart can seem constantly unattainable.
It is a vital life-affirming truth that the only constant is transience.
We all rely on the unconditional acceptance of the flow of the fleeting moment for our conscious awareness to stabilise on a Single-point of unquestioned reference so that we can make moment-to-moment judgements and take necessary decisions at a most elementary level at the prompting of humdrum and fluctuating local circumstances.
Our innate condition is predicated on nothing more than our existence in physical form and our awareness in the Universe of objects and sentience. These are the fundamental reasons we are alive and we remain alive.
Life in us begins without our conscious volition, but we risk everything, the disturbance of our balance, even our sanity, if we continue in life as if life were external to us.
A life fully lived is lived in the passionate and impassioned understanding of life’s array of power and beauty.
Visions of beauty and power are instantly available to those who make the effort to recognise themselves as transient bearers of their portion of brilliance in the array.
Key to the recognition of their own beauty and power is the acceptance of the moment – the EveryNow – as life’s vessel and array.
I coined the word EveryNow in early 2016 to denote a cherished elevated state of being. The word has its roots in the understanding of the illusory nature of clinging to this or that, be it mood, perception, mode of thought, or time itself!
Mine is a story of 50 years of redemption and salvation. No other response than humility and continuous gratitude will do.
I devote much of my time and energy to show how immediate, powerful and freely available is the juicy goodness of the force that some call the life force, others, the will to live, and still more know by words like love, hope, peace, heart, spirit. Alas! So few take the trouble to step over the threshold of words and… love to live!
There 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 my friend, whose startling quality of compassion in action and word has made me strive to understand its source, the better to assimilate and emulate this living spirit of compassion.
I see value in the observation of Acceptance in action. Acceptance requires no reasons, demands no constructs and it can be seen in the healthy balanced operation of every living organism.
I tap into vast reserves of value from the practice of Acceptance. Acceptance smoothly paves over the crevasses of treacherous impulse to blunder and bluff.
I am in confrontation every day.
These are great stirrings, as in coming upon a selfish owner who is letting a dog “worry” swans. Or these may be small, such as a person whose mere approach rouses an aggressive response in me. My negative response stems from my self regard blinkered from and blind to the life I share with people around me.
Acceptance is my confronted self choosing to reach up to a panoramic viewpoint, and consciously remaining where I am, while I offer to the eyes of my eyes the gift of the widest possible perspective at my location.
Once I arrive – and I can arrive in a flash – I am at once reduced to my true size relative to “where I am at”, and I am released to soar up to great peaks of lightness of being and down to lush fertile places of human comfort, warmth and joy.
Acceptance is my loyal friend when I walk hand in hand with my other awareness: Sufficiency.
Whenever I allow myself to come into closest connection with some external event, it can show me clearly and directly a total, utter and complete satisfaction. It is “Sufficiency”.
It is my awareness of sufficiency which links me directly to the sum of all joys.
Any joy piercing the living moment is sufficient.
I can choose to go out and about with a pocketful of forethought, so that, when I encounter a delight, I need not let it enter me only to pass me by. For example, I may be kissed, and as I stop taking breath, all the breaths I have ever breathed are contained in that kiss.
The treasure awaiting my discovery in any experience is made visible by my inborn ability to allow its inherent quality of sufficiency to overtake both it and me.
Sufficiency is the end contained in the beginning.
If I can only stop trying to dream, I can awake to find I am being dreamed by my dream.
The flesh of humility is clothed by the modest completion of Sufficiency.
Gratitude for this infinite store of sufficiencies!
I get it. Some of our remotest distant ancestors set much store by the creation and maintenance of these turf and stone and rock carved mazes.
They also venerated their uncomplicated maze motifs in their decorative jewellery, metalwork. I speculate how they danced their Maze dances by firelight and feasting.
We see landscapes where the wind-blown engravings of their Maze representations question our eyes today, thousands of years after they were graven onto vertical faces of stone.
It seems perfect to me that the depictions we are shown are devoid of people walking or standing inside the boundaries they figuratively present.
Only visualise the boundaries as representations of our journey.
Beginning. End. Mystery.
The viewer sees the journey. The Journey invites the viewer.
Life is the universal invitation to take the simplest line between two footsteps and repeat until the sun has set for the last time.
There is no question; the answers throng the lifelines.
No more mysterious and no more obvious challenge exists than to step out onto the lines of our lives, foot by foot, word by word.
When our hearts do this, we find peace through the acceptance of all eventualities, and our blood flows us on the way of the Maze.
The face of the carved Maze is weathered by so many cycles of the sun and moon. It is not raised high for eyes to see from all horizons, like the pyramids.
The Maze is a factual organic, circular statement. It reads, “That which is to be begun, will end to begin again endlessly.”
No monument shows with such understated elegance and enduring eloquence the peace and the humble privilege that is in the living of life.
I read the Maze as an open invitation to infinity. Within the limits of vision of my own boundaries, I return to my little mantra:
Ridding ourselves of the identification with self – that there is a thinker of thoughts rather than just thoughts – offers a kind of freedom.
It is said that identification with self causes suffering and removing it results in a much sought after state, variously called – enlightenment, awakening, Buddha mind, etc.
In my EveryNow blog, I try to put into accessible words my powerful experiences of this freedom. And I try to write about the ways and means by which people can benefit by consciously paying increased attention to the world of concepts and perceptions.
My hope is that my readers can readily believe they too can taste this freedom, or at least set up in them a curiosity to find out if it can easily be a valid outcome for themselves, as it has been for me.
I agree with some who say such an exalted state of freedom is readily accessible and on the surface of consciousness. I too do not believe it is so tough to access, so deeply buried that it requires the dedication of a lifelong quest.
Others like me, who were born and educated in Western dualistic traditions of thought and action, rather than in oriental non-dualistic cultures, may need to look to the example of others if they are to begin to examine the value of this freedom.
People who feel the promptings which give them reason to question their fixed beliefs are in my readership.
The promptings they receive from unexplained aspects of their inner life and the observations they make of their own experiences of awe, may be the conduits to discovery of the extent of the limitations they place on themselves by their long-standing willing acceptance of the status quo as defined, unalterable and axiomatic.
I know that the most ineffable trancendental concepts are far easier to define by talking about what they are not. It takes an) increased intensity of creative thinking to avoid description by negatives. It is always a productive, even revelatory exercise.
So here is my non-negative sketch of the me I call myself.
I am mortal, biological, animate. I will die. The atoms and particles of which I am composed will scatter and outlive my physical form. Something will remain of the effects on the world that my presence and interactions in it created. Those effects will dissipate according to the law of entropy.
A time will come when all records and traces of my life will have grown cold and vanished. I am happy with this scenario, because I recognise all my human responsibilities revolve around the axis of my present moment.
I have arrived at a visualisation of the moment which satisfies my human inclination to forever find answers. I characterise it, within my own limited understanding, as “EveryNow”.
If I have to pick out one outstanding quality of “EveryNow” it is abundance. The moment in which I am held is abundance. The moment into which I am constantly falling in cycles of helpless harmless renewal is abundance.
The whelm of moment causes me to envision myself as so richly endowed with all my needs fulfilled, that I am nearly swamped by its sufficiency.
In this state, I have only to exercise a degree of voluntary acceptance and my being is lit by delight. Considerations of grief future or pain past are laughably insignificant.
Therefore I laugh in Love’s Presence E v e r yN o w
The charm of the place name of Breamore is that it will never get to be pronounced as it appears on paper, neither today, nor tomorrow, and this is how the locals would have it, as it always has been from times immemorial.
To a person who walks with receptivity and who has eyes to see, there are still surface characteristics, and traces of the workings and the worship by seasonal routines of the earliest settlers on these fertile furlongs.
Relics can be discerned of the nurture and respectful land management from their effect on the ground of ancient legs and hands, and in the way the landscape has been allowed to roll and unfold, as well as in the disposition of the extant flora, in particular the avenue of Yew Trees.
This view in my photo has none of the trees in question. I slid under barbed wire and down a bank to take this panorama about a hundred yards from the line of the Yew enclosed track.
They will all have been planted as borders along at least a mile of footway leading gently uphill to the Breamore Miz Maze, one of England’s eight surviving Neolithic turf mazes.
Though these Yews seen today are sadly disrespected, for the lack of people purposed with their health and well-being, each one in their ground-holding today stands witness to their continuous presence throughout centuries gone by.
Those days are long ago to our kind. The noble Yews count out time at four blinks-a-year. They remember when enough hands were living hereabouts to manage and maintain them.
Those ordinary land workers followed the path of working traditions established through customs of usage by their forebears, who had in their turn devoted part of their time to their duties to the Yew Trees.
These rites of care they performed alongside their other work out of respect for the wisdom of the folklore passed down from the ancients who had lived with the awe that the natural and magical and mystical properties of the Yew Trees inspired.
Any sapling requires a minimum of protection to survive on its way to maturity. Some of the trees along here are these days in a pitiably broken, delapidated state.
Nor you nor I need arboriculture to recognise neglect and disrespect where casual damage and overclimbing brambles are evident.
There are many full grown yews here. I see them as statements of ancient human will. Decision makers a long time ago intended them to be growing here, each in its place on either side of this thoroughfare, perhaps in perpetuity, as they would have had it in their minds’ view.
I see them in their shaded orderly procession as contrasted to the acres to the east and west whose unbroken flatness was created by machine under the will of other, more modern minds.
The lines in the landscape are still available to be seen. They are so empty and silent of oxen, of horse, and of men in their hardy boots, coarse-cloth clothes, head caps and gruff chit-chat.
In their landscape I believe I still see where they took themselves, one after the other on their working ways, mornings to and evenings from, season after season.
Every place of habitation, shelter for beast or man, place of veneration, memorial or worship, every roadbend, hillcrest, stream, dugout or hillock visible today were joined by footsteps following footsteps in lines of service and daily sacrifice.
I see time’s imprint all over these lands, either by design, or by default of neglect or disregard for the ancient patterns.
The land shapes are often readable marks, interpretable very much like the notes on an old music score. Here is pattern, rhythm, glory, major chords of root, and upthrust of choral gladness in the Sun’s light. Here too is destruction, cynical trashing that clashes a terrible dissonance against the greatness of this year’s delicate greening.
Wide open I pass by, and where I can pause my footfall on a noiseless day, I am like to hear the past speak up from the earth. I am with the people whose blood and bones it once nourished.
They are me. I am they.
It is a simple, and often extremely poignant exchange of recognition, gratitude and kinship performed walking alone and in silence.
A brief study of the specialist maps which list ancient monuments, Neolithic and other earthworks, and Roman to Victorian road and field boundaries, is most revealing of the vast bustle of noises from beyond the past. Empty now of sound.
Love’s presence
The Breamore Miz Maze is one such place where lines of connection, ceremony and duty converged and do still converge, even if the lines today are carrying the feet of the curious, the nostalgic, the dog-walkers and the occasional intrepid lovers!
I have an image of a young fern frond vividly imprinted on my mind.
I sat in a heath of ferns all night and throughout dawn one warm windstill day approaching Summer Solstice in 1966.
I was sailing through my first and only LSD trip. In tandem with this striking symmetrical image, came the words by Dylan Thomas again and again, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower… “
The green fractal shapes of the fern fronds at eye-level all around found their home in my body in the same immediate way that the final jigsaw piece drops into the overall picture.
The fit of those frozen living shapes entered the twin vanguards of my brain and through them they revealed the uninterpretable immensity of their purposeful power.
I might close and reopen my eyes, but the ferns’ gigahertz scream of presence remained the same. Not a shred of illusion, nothing of my own projection, pure ferns in dead calm hurricanes of potent aliveness.
This realisation over 50 years ago, in the way it presented to my naked raw senses, continues to have a positive and heart-expanding impact on my everyday life.
The enormity of the power of the will to live was made visible in the most direct way to my animal self.
An animal, such as a cat, horse, or fish processes external stimuli first from a centre of instant reactions. A movement seen or a sound heard is “It will eat me,” or “I will eat it”.
Run or fight. Kill or be killed. My reason, my intellect, took no part in assimilating this impression.
Around dawn, a woodpecker began tapping on a lone pine tree within 10 yards of where I was sitting cross-legged. I felt joyful and at peace as the bird repeatedly injected the silence of this new midsummer’s day with staccato sounds.
Later that day, I wrote a poem about this, called Student Woodpecker, which I still cherish.
I am so blessed in that wherever I go out into the natural world, cultivated or wild, the raw strength and single-pointed power of the will to live thus revealed forever remains visible to me, stripped bare of pretty ideas, nice thoughts.
We are all as alike as peas in a pod. Grass and flowers die. Houses and mountains crumble.
We have in common – every one of us – our innate sense of self-preservation, our basic humanity, our need in common for love, air, food, drink, warmth, security, and safety in companionship.
I recoil from trying to assimilate enough knowledge of politics or religion to become capable of qualifying my modes of thought or action according to their principles or precepts.
All my observations of the continuum in which I exist point to one thing – transience. The further back in my time I retreat, I still see the same quality of impermanence.
This predictable unpredictability, which in isolation would resemble a pit of empty despair, always presents laced with scents, colours and shapes of love.
EveryNow is my shorthand for the unending orgasm of loving to live, EveryNow is my X and Y and Z axes of celebration of the joyful flow of existence.
My reference of my sentient consciousness to that flow of change, to that intimate turbulence in my microcosm, is mirrored in the indiscernible motion of the violent unfurling of energetic matter in the Universal macrocosm.
All these things are fractals of flux.
I say, let them take high precedence among the attributes worth taking the trouble and time identifying with, regardless of our physical shape, financial stability, health, grounding or lack of grounding,
The fact of suffering is much less useful to understand.
Dive in! Submerge, let the savage unknowability of fractal flux close over my head while it is under this influence. Be attached to it, take inspiration for decisions to action, give official recognition to it as the truth and validity suffused through and through the heart of the being of the next bystander in the bus queue. Or in me!
Time spent on focus on pain is time not spent in the pursuit and sharing of the celebration of bliss in all its forms and infinite fluctuations.
Think about it… We come complete with pain at birth, and, when viewed from within, pain advances our understanding almost not at all of the peace and love that animates us, from which we all arise and back to which we are all dancing each other home
[Quotation from Rubeena.AK] “Be so individually developed that you love humanity irrespective of beliefs, background, gender, race, ethnicity, culture, traditions, colour, language, nationality, personality or or any other macro/micro differences. The more you are compassionate, peaceful and accepting towards yourself, the more you will be compassionate peaceful and accepting towards others. How we see others is a reflection of how we see our selves. We were born to blend in without giving up our individuality.”
When I see and hear a bee in flight, I can frame it in words in my thought as, bee, hive member, honey-gatherer, pollinator, dangerous, pain-bringer, endangered insect.
The way I see the bee without doubt equates to my perception of it through my thought associations.
I tend to exist as a pinball in play exists. My thoughts bounce me. My thinking “I” knocks against thought-pictures, and I’m bouncing off word-imprints from my sensory input all day.
Most of the time I relate to people in my immediate neighbourhood in superficial ways.
When I notice a person passing near, out of habit I am inclined to estimate the identity from a limited range of mainly visual cues, derived from my picture of the me I call myself.
What happens to my impression of the bee when my sensitivity to my own identity is low to vanishing point?
What happens when my preconception of the bee, and my decades long memories of bee instances are out of reach, not present at all?
This summer afternoon story goes like this.
I had started into wakefulness from my slumped pose seated in sunlight in the garden. In the absence of explicit assumptions about the bee, I heard its buzz, I did not see it.
I was on the rim between volcanic fire and magnetic sleep. I was distracted by the sound of a bee. Distracted only as far as to understand the buzz meant no threat to me. I also deduced the bee and its now receeding sound strake were not relevant to me at this moment.
My Bee >/< Me unitary moment occurred when the bee and I tacitly acknowledged each other’s presence in the afternoon.
I became aware of these things. First, I had woken up and registered the proximity of the bee. Second, I removed my attention from the bee. Third, I received with clarity the bee’s thought that I was irrelevant to its determined flight trajectory, exactly as I too had come swiftly to the same conclusion.
The point made by both the bee and I in that instant was that we were both aware of one another, and aware we were superfluous to each other’s needs.
There is a parallel here for people. We often glance in the direction of another person, only to acknowledge in the briefest non-engaged contact, our mutual disinterest.
This is an often repeated instance between strangers of assessment of threat or of potential purpose.
The fight or flight response at the most primitive amygdala level to detected movement goes, “I will eat it, or it will eat me”.
Street-wise risk assessment relies on the recognition of multiple commonalities, beginning with the plain fact we are both alive moving beings.
I felt a strong common shared sentience on an animal plane with the bee. I was in the presence of sentient life, life with a soul.
As the bee flew by, although I did not see it, I fully recognised it as a sentient being.
I actually received the bee saying, with dignity and self-assuredness, “I must go about my business; you about yours”.
The process of deduction we were simultaneously engaged in, the bee and I, was the equivalent of two humans who cross on a path.
One has business and purpose unrelated to the other, and, in the continuation of their separate paths, they explicitly and implicitly share in an automatic mutual recognition only available between two sentient beings!
It matters not to me, a few days on from my vision, whether I am still giving in to the temptation to imprint my image on the world outside my body or not.
For this briefest of brief union with the mind of a bee, I recognise a blessing beyond all reckoning.
My friend Bryan Alkins said on Friday 2nd October 2015 – “The past is the past! How far in the past doesn’t matter. Live in the moment. 🙏”
If I occasionally believe I am dangerously far divorced from “normality” because all that matters is what’s going on now, I will beg my pardon and defer to the moment.
I have long held the view (for near on forty years) that those who disavow the mystical and say there is no thing beyond the material and the provable, are trapped in a bubble of mystic magic divinity which knows and loves them, but which is sadly not visible to them.
Now I am believing it is simpler even than all of that.
Those who have not begun to bathe totally in the now cannot conceive of doing so. They believe it has no value to them, because what does not relate to their own lived experience appears to them as unsubstantiated evidence without the necessary confirmation of cause and effect.
EveryNow is that lived bliss of unconditional immediacy of experience without reference to past, future, or to labels of name or pertainment.
People who relate every present moment to its antecedent and who take care to measure it by its potential future effect make the mistake of regarding EveryNow as a state of instability from which no practical outcomes through reason and judgement are to be initiated.
After all, whoever thought it wise to choose to be a passenger in a vehicle driven by a person in a state of bliss?
Fear is sometimes taken to be the next logical step after identification with uncertainty. To see new ways of being as strange is to associate those who operate from this state as strange and perhaps to be feared.
Nothing is more precise, more glaringly pinpointed with a sense of the absolute than EveryNow!
Here and there grows a noisiness, a rowdiness, a clamour of intimacy when rambling along such country footpaths.
So much is going on, it’s like I’m straying onto a major sports arena in full cry, or a merry musical gathering of the clans.
Along the verdant corridors of spring and summer, smells, sounds, sunlight and shadow build the atmosphere into a fairground, like a local village fair.
I slow down, I stroll through. I am an animal, welcome to enter their vegetable world.
I animal, and they vegetable, we are engaged in crunching numbers, each in our way arriving at new results by recombinant synergies.
The insects I know are here, I cannot quite see. They are sweetly intent on survival.
Two paces in front of me, something in the way giant me disturbs the air around their tiny selves compels them into instant propulsion.
Zero-to-Cheerio in less than the blink of my eye. Gone. Undiscoverable except to their own kind!
When the busy enclosed path opens out at last, the sounds of silence simply reappear, I and my awareness are thrown back to bump up against each other again, a Great Bell Chant leading me from my heart.
My feet take up the beat and the starship of my body is alone again in the vast unknown mysterious reaches of the Big Green
Do I need to escape from the ego? Should I try to subjugate it? Must I recognise my ego as primitive or maleficent in order to enable me to encounter my being in harmony and unity with the Universe?
I can say that my experience of awakened and often blissful consciousness has all my life been inclusive of all the factors at work.
I have always acknowledged and accepted my body and my mind in sickness or in health, in pleasure or in pain.
The “I” I call myself co-exists with my awareness of external and extraneous sensory input such as my hunger for peace, for food, for self-retrieval, as well as the many promptings in parallel of my mind’s primitive impulses to denigrate, downplay and deny the plenitude of my being, even when these lead me into anxiety, misery, violence, or indolence, self-harm and self-neglect.
These days, I begin to make distinctions between my gratitude for the acceptable reality of the support my ego gives to me and my gratitude for my ability to triage its continual background streaming and screamings that lets me identify and elevate the nourishment from out of the chatter.
Am I not fortunate to have arrived at such a fulcrum of balanced appreciation of life and in particular of my life in this rather strangely delightful all-encompassing continuum?
Yes, without doubt!
That awareness is the spring which refreshes me all of the time. That is the reason I have hope, the reason for me to go about, to search and to connect.
My heart reaches out in its search for life in all, all, all its forms.
I know that the search for life is not in the finding, nor in the failing to find. It is not in the choice of what life appears to present.
The search for life is in the lucid compassionate loving to live life.
Day by day, moment to delicious moment, that is exactly what keeps my heart beating and my soul flowering.
All who create with diligent humility reach into the heart of things. Creatives work to release and share what they find mirrored there in their own heart.
We who create from the springs of heart’s love can never be wholly content with our output.
The act of powerfully self-validating creative discovery must reveal a part of the fabric of eternal or infinite truths by whose existence we as sentient beings receive that which animates of our heart and soul.
We can never wholly own even the smallest portion of the magic that issues from the creative striving that always inspires us to share.
We reach into our heart’s space where no human constructs exist. That place contains nothing that can be owned.
Here it is easy to describe what we begin to discover in terms of what it is not.
If we are so gifted that we do not need to reach for any tools of creativity, we might find creative inspiration from the place of no-constructs.
There is a no-place which contains so much of no-thing that what fills it full up to overflowing is not measured in quantity. It is only qualities of the absolute – absolute purity and beauty!
Here the most difficult and the most creative thing a human can attempt is to describe qualities of absolute in non-negative terms!
If it ‘works’, if it arrives and is total in its valid truthfulness, it takes on its own life as a thread of the love with which the unseen unseeable fabric of the universe is constructed.
We evolve simutaneously with what we are propelled into sharing.
From the moment of birthing, what we share is no longer of us. It is certainly no longer ours.
Biodanza – expect nothing, ask for nothing, keep nothing, give everything.
Allow Biodanza to happen. Simply listen and watch. Follow closely what the Facilitator says.
Observe the Vivencia demonstrations. With regular participation, Biodanza becomes more and more magical.
The whole secret is to expect nothing.
The moment I say to myself, “I’m going to do this or that.” Or if I think, “This partner will like or not like the expression on my face”, this is when I stop receiving, and the resulting isolation in which I arrive will simply continue to cloak my heart.
Be open my heart, absolutely you must be open!
The extravagant wonder of pure contact when I simply invite and welcome another to share for a while my most intimate heart space!
What is written in my heart, or seen in my eyes, absolutely cannot expose me.
Only the energy and the strength of my love will be experienced by the other person whose love and energy are waiting to surprise us both!
Then, unpredictably, unexpectedly, the other person and I may become electrified, illuminated.
That is the beauty of dissolution! The dissolving and falling away out of sight of fear.
Fear received from years of stern social conditioning, from barriers cultural, barriers intellectual. Everything zapped in instant vaporisation!
Sometimes such beauty is overpowering. It can lead into a brilliant obliteration of self, where the mind is left standing in awed witness to the ephemeral marriage of heart and heart.
Always it is life-affirming and always it serves to show how intense love quenches every last residue of fear!
Most often I will dance eyes closed. If I open my eyes, I see too much. I think too many thoughts. My mind tries to make my body move in this or that “clever” way. No! Eyes closed, I let the music dictate the shapes my body makes.
Expect plenty of time, this time, next time, to open my eyes, and swim and surf terribly very vulnerable in the dazzle of power and beauty visible immediately in front of my eyes, in the eyes of another shining soul!
Do expect love, for the simple reason Love is present EveryNow
The View at 72+ 