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
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
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 is wrong! 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 exists in my proximity to a pebble ‘in the flesh’, never mind the delight of meeting another 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 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
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.
The yellow corn was growing gold and ripely. Epiphany the First on holiday near Cahir, co.Tipperary, Ireland.
In August 1977, I crossed the threshold, the portal to an intense liberation.
Since that time I had never encountered a story that showed me I am one of many to have been smelted in a furnace of the heart and to have survived the ordeal of refinement by burning. I surely am not alone!
Since that time, I have described only to certain close friends how, over a few days and nights, the layers of self peeled away in pain and incomprehension.
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I remember walking along Exhibition Road, London and instead of the usual bland, blanked off faces of people walking past me, I became acutely aware of reading the reality of each person’s spirit in the expression on every face.
I saw many were contorted and consumed by loathing.
I saw some who were almost completely lacking in hope.
Some were intensely unhappy, as if their next facial expression was to be The Scream, ‘that’ painting by Edvard Munch. Very possibly I was visualising my own projections.
The old assumptions began to drop away from me, as if recent ghosts of my own identity were drifting off, abandoning me in ones and twos.
The assumptions of who I am are like those straight and rooted tracks on which I automatically rely for my next blink, step, next thought, next breath. I and all of us do depend on lifetime timeline assumptions without giving them a second thought. We never call them into question, unless we perceive extreme danger from an external threat or sudden inescapable challenge.
Whatever it was that had begun to move, my self-belief was evaporating, and I found myself left with fewer and fewer safe assumptions about who I was.
My friends who are my familiar friends inside of me were hurrying away somewhere else, not staying to see what happens next.
In quite a short time, as if I had no power to control the processes my spirit was undergoing, I shed my few and flimsy onion-skin layers of self-belief, until I reached a point of maximum intimacy, where the core of my being lay exposed like a small pool of white-hot molten metal resting in the base of an unmovable immutable crucible. It was painful, like active nettle-stings, but it was endurable.
I was drawn to rural isolation as the best and least threatening setting in which to preserve what I had left of me. I had no clues, no map to follow in this descent.
I bought rail and ferry tickets to Cork. I asked for bus timetables at the central London Bord Fáilte. I set out with a rigid metal frame grey canvas rucksack.
I travelled from London to County Tipperary, Ireland for a summer holiday. I knew very well I couldn’t escape from myself. But I came to rural Ireland to find a green of peace in August, because I had become afraid for my sanity. I presumed something was going to happen to me. It seemed important to give my undistracted attention to whatever it was going to be.
My next memory is of getting off the bus at the quiet stop called Cahir Cross. I walked along a reassuringly peaceful road, and I checked in to my family run guesthouse.
For safety, or rather, for self-preservation, I stayed indoors. I sat in my B&B room. I remember a pot of tea and a kindness of biscuits. I was as unprotected, fragile, brittle, as a soft bodied insect.
If I should step outside, or if I were to add to my sensory input in howsoever small a way, I might go off the edge like an untethered astronaut – lost in a mild but unending emptiness.
With a new morning, a brightly sunlit summer morning, stasis came.
Here was a still point where nothing more could happen to me. I was at the bottom of the descent, but I was not finished off.
The pain was no longer inside of me. It was not there. I remember silence.
I weep today and every time, as I recall the beauty of that silence. This silence was brand new. It was much louder inside than outside.
Silence indescribable, solid to the timid touch, had replaced pain and the frequent cramping presence of adrenaline.
I could breathe again. I could hear my breathing. I looked outwards. The yellow corn was growing gold and ripely in the small square field beyond the house. The field of gold glowed unpretentiously just outside my window. No wind moved the corn stalks baking under the blue sky.
Every ear of corn still stands there, warm in the midday heat and unmoving in my mind’s eye.
I felt an amazing, delicate, intense pleasure at seeing my host family around me, simply and quietly going about their day. I hardly dared move in case this most ordinary sweetness should crackle and dissolve.
My host family’s silent, but tangible normality was my personal reassurance. Their wordless presence was as loud as if I were being publicly baptised at the centre of a crowd.
I was filled with a soft bliss, like a person drinking after a long thirst.
The words of my drink were these:
“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” [Julian of Norwich]
One thing I knew with great certainty and I would forever carry with me, that however long I live, whatever the severity of the test, I would always be able to survive.
And so I packed my rucksack to return home to the world of work and to continue with a new relationship which would culminate two years later in marriage, a new home and a family.
My awakened heart burns golden consuming nothing – in sickness and in health – from the centre to the outermost edge.
And this is the mantra I composed to celebrate the awakening:
🐣The unexpected quiet trumpet call that awakens me to the stasis of bliss🕊️
As a boy, I was for a while an avid reader of sci-fi comics. They contained individual short stories. I willingly gave myself up to be lost in them.
I always remember how one particular ‘Alien’ described itself. This being, stranded on our planet Earth, said of itself I am “An Entity without Identity”.
The predicament of this creature from Outer Space has always beckoned to me. Whatever quality, whatever identity was attributed or assigned to it, that was what it instantly became!
A child passed by in the park, found what he said was a ball. On that instant, to his alien chagrin, this voyager from the great beyond became a rubber ball and the child began to play with it.
The child met an older man in the same park, who explained that the interior of a star contains matter at such extreme high density that a ball like the boy was holding could weigh as much as a battleship.
All at once, it was so! Crowds of people flocked to the park to see it and to try to move it.
Luckily for this unhappy stranded cosmic traveller, after several misadventures arising out of mismatched identities, someone with compassion and advanced gifts of logic got it back on its galactic journey again by assigning to it a cleverly constructed sequence of identities.
My fascination with this story was an example of my early attraction to the expression of myself as fluid impermanence, fully filled with and indeed intuitively comprised of the potential of possibilty. It is a concept with which I was later to find stimulating parallels in Zen.
So when someone sees me for example as “full of surprises”, in a trice, this is in truth my core persona…
If I am to some “open, creative and full of life”, all at once this is the truth of me. I do not change. I am what I see is mirrored by those who take me into their momentary gaze.
For the time of being, in an identity made solely of vulnerability, everything is possible. It is all true EveryNow. Nothing is excluded. Until the next trumpet call!
I accept, with all that I am, all of my gifts, whether they are naturally occurring, or come out of my own striving.
I accept my Acceptance above all.
I value and accept my Acceptance, because this Life, which is superabundance of Joy and Love, has found an acceptance in my identity, and has assumed a proportion of my identity without my volition and with an attachment that never did nor ever will depend on my acceptance of it.
This life allows me to glimpse with understanding, humility, unending gratitude and Awe the common condition of conscious sentience that I share with every particle, subatomic particle and energy wave that ever was, is and will be!
Miraculously, beyond crude casuistry or intense interrogatory, out of non-existence I am born.
Into the selfsame, unanswerable, miraculous non-existence I am to return.
This crucial instant in which the stasis of my sentience pivots, which never begins and never ends, sways and rocks me with tender reasurance, like I’m in a womb, suspended in bliss between my two non-existences.
Virtually undifferentiated and all but indistinguishable from the continuum, except for the miracle of life, “I Am Love”
How differently would we behave towards each other, if every one of us could directly experience seeing our Earth from space?
If we lived on a planet with PERMANENTLY CLEAR STARRY SKIES, how would we behave towards one another? Don’t reply! Behave as if you did
The germ of the idea of the magic bathing to be found outside in the Big Green came to me in 1978.
Bliss-in-the-Green
I had just begun going into the Surrey Hills for planned solo rambles, rucksack, map, water bottle, camera and all.
After about half an hour, I’d stop grumbling about the effort, and I noticed a falling away of mind chatter.
Then my senses of sight and sound received a perfectly bionic boost.
Walking on in this state, the blindingly ordinary reveals itself stark naked, and the silences of the Big Green all a-growing explain to me at unambiguous extreme high volume not that they have nothing whatsoever to tell me that I didn’t know, but that before I let my red-red heart off its leash to roam free, I didn’t remember I had forgot what I had always known forever.
For years I questioned how I can be in total comfort with myself? How can I be happy and my spirits be in balance?
Always these questions around introspection and self-enquiry for me.
After my very young inner child had successfully built grand defences against early trauma, the sea of companionship receded from me and I was on my own fortified island.
Marooned as the “me I call myself” long after my defences had ceased to serve their purpose, I was perpetually on an elusive quest to “catch” myself engaged fully in my most completely alive and revealing moments, at peace and in bliss.
So I feel to share again in gratitude and in simple celebration the mutual recognition of light and beauty in another, and the reflection in me.
Here, in another time of writing, is my pixel of truth as a member of humanity… ” So when I try to define my life’s force in words, or dance, or music, or art, it does not resist me, neither can it escape me, because it is me.
On rare exquisite occasions my life-force can turn towards me and light me up with a smile of a beautiful person whose gaze I meet, and I am melted clean. “
I once put this on paper…” In the intervening time since I first wrote this, I have many times over been ‘melted clean’. Every time this minor miracle happens, my heart tells me, ‘Leap for joy! Loop the loop!’ until the last remnants of grime and sludge disappear from the windscreen of my pedestrian view. “
It is when I am no longer aware of it, and have not ‘reminded myself’ to tell myself that I am happy, that the quintessence of pleasure occurs. It occurs the way a bubbling freshwater spring upwells.
And here, for many years, and indeed for my first 66 years, submission to the joy of the moment – EveryNow – remained a pretty metaphor, an intriguing glimpse of other people’s existences, but never my own.
My route to arrival (in part) at EveryNow was through my furious and repeated focus over an extended period of years on these two puzzles.
What constitutes the bliss that so utterly takes “me” over? And where am “I” at the moment I vanish and become “become” bliss?
Again… what is the experience like to completely “be” someone else? Put in other words, what is it to fully present my own self with the pure distillation of the sentience of another living sentient creature?
By engaging myself in this roller-coaster thought-ride, centrifugal force may fling me off. It is just one of the many ways to lose myself and find the world.
If I care to think on it, this is the best endeavour of all of my powers of understanding and intuition set to the task of vanishing as being me, and to entering into the sacred presence of the essential essence of another. Another man, woman, tree, even a stone!
Less is so much more that it defies description!
And it is this lack of definitive Definitions, this willingness of mine to take the courage of my own spiked curiosity, in the absence of labelling intentions, that brings me to see there are two things which have meaningful existence: Peace and Love.
Love is the child of Light and Peace.
What makes all the foregoing worthwhile and valid? These two: Peace and Love. Peace and Love are qualities which together constitute my heart, my most sacred personal space.
And I have a simple practical way to find myself whenever I am in need, feel troubled, restless or lost.
The reality for me of the existence in me of Love and Peace is not just a chunk of factual knowledge that I can refer to.
Through thick and thin, illness, despair, literal clinical madness and the mayhem of chaos, I know for sure I need only look inwards.
I only need touch into this heart of mine with a smile in order to reignite my entire panoply of reasons to be alive and to continue to live.
Instantly I am driven to raise and praise these qualities and make them known and shared far and wide.
I and some others who took part in the guided Tree Walk with Anthony Goh one morning at Colourfest in 2013, intensely felt the experience and came away with deep lasting positive impressions from the trees themselves.
The two most tactile tangible realities we are all intimately in connection with throughout our existence are other human beings within the animal world, and grass, flowers and trees, as well as the plants we eat as food in the world of vegetables.
I publish this again here in thanks to Anthony. Before that day, a tree was an item of landscape, seen, but unrecognised, unacknowledged.
— Earth Mother bore our shoeless dancing feet with tender green love. Sky Father trees, all unconscious of their benign majesty, held millions of green solar flags high over us.
— At Colourfest 2013, our experience with Tree Walk on Sunday, two by two, now eyes shut, now eyes open, touching, embracing, discovering the treeness of trees in the way of young lovers, while we bathed in the peal of bells blown towards us on a light warm breeze from Wimborne St Giles Church, was the pinnacle of bliss. It deeply moved all who took part, whether first-timers like myself, or not.
— The shockingly blissful conjunction of ourself with trees to the serious and gentle promptings of Anthony Goh was, in one word, thrilling.
— From that day on, my relationship with trees has been changed forever. For one thing, trees to me are no longer there like items which happen to be in my line of sight outside of me.
Trees at last I know to be fellow beings. Every one has a life story, a unique identity – a Treesonality.
Every one has an inner smile which I know I can share just by spending a little quiet time together.
The self I call “I” is a flat calm transparent surface. It is a most natural boundary between water and air.
Both air and water are clear and almost colourless. The air goes up out of sight and the water deeply down.
The surface is without ripple or feature. It extends outward without horizon.
It is silent bliss.
Today more than before in my whole life, my state is open and aware and quiet.In this state I can ride and stay in balance during the time I am presented in the here and now with thoughts, feelings, distractions, discomfort, pain.It is through my recent journeys of heart awakening that I can fully access healing.
I have come to a resolution of previously unrecognised redundant defences, constructed in childhood. My new-found expanding awareness of myself opens doors to present joyfulness, and to a new appreciation of the sanctity of the gift of life being lived and experienced more and more and yet more abundantly.
Together with self-awareness, I increasingly open my eyes and value the gift of life I see in the lives of others.
To stay truly alive, I absolutely need air, food, water. I have to do the necessary work, if I am to act on my craving for the value of the sweet shelter afforded me from compassionate non-judgemental companionship of others.
In this state, I no longer need to feel secreted away fearful inside a safe place of my own making. It feels like for the first time, I am capable of experiencing the entirety of the richly textured reality of here and now.
I want to shout and shine with gratitude and wonder at simply being vital and alive. And more surprising still, with all this wonderment I find I am fearless and brave, because love is the light that leads me on my journey.
Intense love quenches every last residue of fear. The awareness of such love is self sustaining. It feels like perpetual motion eternally safe!
We are all capable of healing.
It’s about trusting love to come into the closest contact inside my most personal sacred space, and knowing that there, in that serene yet spectacularly huge place of peace, I can heal.
When I completely allow this trust of knowing into my vision of life, when I let trust be the number one in my decision-making, I can begin to heal. We all of us can begin to heal
The View at 72+ 