It is at least half a century since I lived the pain and confusion of the dark.
How much can I usefully contribute to comfort and encourage you in your dark time today?
In these happy years since I re-joined the Tribe, the peer group, and entered freely into open-hearted communion with like friends, I am rediscovering the world of connection as I go.
After a falling away of fruitless trying and trying, and the beginnings of acceptance had crept into and become allied with my day to day curiosity, the way out of the dark for me was to place myself in the way of making acquaintances and friendships.
It is a step which requires a certain amount of bravery. But not more than, say, deciding to run for that bus, and not just to let it drive off without me.
You are preoccupied. You may feel plagued. Stand back from the troubles inside, face outwards with curiosity and bravery.
Look to immerse your attention in person in the presence of other prople’s lives, however different or trivial seeming to what you feel you are enduring.
By being a listener, by giving your precious presence, merely as a sincere witness, both you and the one on whom who you attend will be transformed. It’s not like change; it’s about transformation.
Things began to dramatically shift when I was curious enough and brave enough to join small groups with regular activities.
After about half a century, I began to notice the mirroring in other people.
Yes, the groundwork during that long time span had been prepared by travels through various powerful epiphany experiences along the way. I have set them down elsewhere on my Facebook page. Search for “epiphany” in my EveryNow blog.
All my life, I had taken it for granted that my light belonged hidden under that bushel!
I had so often played down positive comments about me, even from my Mother and Father, that I had lost interest in myself. I hardly gave my morning reflection a second glance.
I began to understand that I had no idea at all who this person I call myself actually is. It was hard to see “me” in photos of me.
I had stopped looking at my reflection in the mirror. I had reduced my image of myself so far down in importance that I had stopped taking myself into consideration.
I received a terrifying and desperate shock when I was asked to describe my very earliest happy memories. I tried to recall the face of the blissful little boy I remembered who was strolling in a flower meadow in the early 1950s.
To my horror, there was only a pale oval where my childish features should have been clear to recognise! I broke down at the realisation.
I no longer recognised the person others recognised when they saw – really saw – me.
This is not to say I never saw others. My desire to see others deeply, holistically and using all my intuition, mind and soul had always been accentuated by the ever-present ‘clouds of unknowing’ which surrounded my image of me.
Today I accept without reservation it is to some degree or other perfectly true to say we are all of us without any exceptions at all, amazing, beautiful, miraculous, even angelic beings.
Through my new found contact, sometimes very intimate contact, as in the joyful practise of regular Biodanza, I arrived at a starting point – the basic premise of which is that we are Love.
“I am Love”. Utter tosh? Wishy-washy slackness of mind?
When I first saw those words, it was in 2013. They made no sense. Read them backwards, forwards, in any order, I still thought some key word must be missing.
I was Love-blind.
I began to feel severely challenged when I tried to maintain my closed-off, shut-down, received attitude of “No not me”, which is inculcated into all of us from our earliest socialising years by wider society.
And then I surrendered!
I was obliged to stop and stand still, when I was brought face-to-face with the light of my original self by repeated “mirrorings” from new people all around me.
These were people I had begun to deeply respect. I began to see with my eyes, possibly for the first time in 66 years, the light of other people’s integrity shining with unconditional trust from their own hearts’ source.
I can never dowse the brilliant and beautiful shocking startlement of finding myself, eye-to-eye, momentarily in the shared sacred space of the heart of another!
I embraced – literally – that fact… I am Love. We are all Love.
“Go meet others” probably sounds trite. But triteness here makes it more, not less valid.
I am drawn to say that the unbearable absence of light and the terrible destructive pain of not being able to find some way of your own to fill the absence is all illusory.
Of course the pain is real. But only as real as the strength of desire aroused by the thought of eating some favourite, but unavailable delicacy.
Thoughts such as these that never lead anywhere but into the dark are an ever-present part of our human condition.
Luckily for our peace of mind and our sanity, with a minimum of training, such thoughts can be spotted as they approach, and we allow them to dissolve, long before they come too close, bite, draw blood, and embed.
If you seek the answer, do not question.
There is no question.
Nothing is buried hidden.
There is always only the answer.
What is the answer? The answer is like two children playing Hide-and-seek.
One counts to twenty, eyes closed.
When the eyes open, oh the shock! The other child never ran to hide, but stayed in front and in plain sight, grinning!
We are human.
Our hearts are not designed for loneliness and our bodies are not capable of tolerating much physical pain.
We are beings.
There is no such thing as a vacuum. No such attainable point as Absolute Zero. The reality of an atom is in an energy equilibrium composed of multiple particle-waveforms replete with unlimited potentiality in spectacular extreme motion.
So it is with us!
A being gains in sentience from other beings, starting with its ancestral origins, and all throughout life and on.
There is no meaning and there is no value in the dark whirlpool.
All any of us need in order to feel a sense of completeness is the witness of true friends. A friend, or an acquaintance with a pure heart, who knows they are constituted of love can always bring me again into the light of my original being for the simple reason that I am love.
Fly! Decide to fly.
I cannot usefully say more. Life is sparkling, ever shifting brilliance. Be dazzled. Go well
The tap of humility opened by Awareness of Acceptance and Sufficiency is one of a set of tools by which to travel and measure and reflect on my life among other lives in a swarm of beings, every one of whom is their own representative of the peace and love of which we are constituent parts, from which we come, and back to which we are all walking or dancing each other home.
I am grateful for the years of my almost daily practise of framing my own existence against the concept of my no longer existing.
I am grateful for the period – almost all my life – when my focus has reverted to the relationship between the transcendent scale of the universe and my small place on Earth in it.
It is this length of time spent reflecting on the scale of infinity compared to my finite world that has clicked into place a realisation.
In my early years, I used the conflict and paradox of questioning my awareness of my living existence by contrast to what that awareness could possibly be “before” I was born and after I cease to be, for the purpose of broadening my experience of mysticism and wonder.
In later years, the idea of me as a dead person would spur me on to live and live well in greater acceptance of the fact of death. And this background meditation on death has brought about a sense of humility and gratitude for every continued moment of life.
Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m very much alive, and that is more often cause for self-coronation and smugness than for humility and gratitude.
Chipper or serene, I will die.
I see I have spent decades bringing my attention to what it is to die, what it means to be me not alive any more. I look at my companion human beings who have noted nothing with measurable precision on the subject of death.
So many abstract feelings, concepts and mysteries affect my life and with my best endeavours none of them stop me from repeatedly running into the brick wall fact of death. Try and try as I might, with all my might, beyond death I cannot reach.
I can think through and use my understanding to breach mystic mysteries and paradoxes of belief and faith.
I can deploy my powers of intuition under guidance of wise healers. Revealed to me are entry portals into the flow of the arrow of time. Where my life past blurs and melts into present moment. There where I assumed contact was futile, I stepped forward to embrace my previous selves for the healing of reconciliation and personal redemption!
I can suspend received belief, accepted standard practices, cast out socially accepted axioms, and I can travel in time, meet and greet my family members past, present, future, converse as I am engaging with you now, with the younger manifestations of myself.
And I can close my eyes, and open the eyes of my eyes, navigate, float at will here and there (without protective gear) to and through any place outside of Earth in Space-time.
By means of all of this, I can arrive in some shape or form to the other side and return bearing new gifts.
Here is where I discover intimations of the supernatural. Here is where floods of infinity and awe comfort and reassure me with adequate helpings of warming endorphines of epiphany and intimations of immortality.
But death, whenever it crops up, is a hard place, a place of no compromise, no colour, which says stentorian, ‘You shall not go past this point’.
Why?
Life and death are not hidden from each other. They are not secrets from anyone. Death with life are hand in hand everywhere. Together they are, from our points of reference, everything.
Why should death be more intractable, and so much less accessible to us humans than life?
One way of thinking about all of this is to change the start point, the reference point from which we see one another and the world we live and die in.
Where we are born, interact, live, love and die is face-to-face here on this our lovely planet.
We can think of ourselves as exotic life forms, five-pointed star creatures, air breathers who walk on a planet blanketed by an air layer. We share this same life-sustaining, planet-wide, breathable shell of air with every other breather on this Earth.
This Earth and all its magical magnificent sharing keeps our gaze fixed on each other here ‘down below’.
Dearly beloved Shakespeare says: “And like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself — Yea, all which it inherit — shall dissolve, And like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.”
This Earth, our only home, is our stage on which we are liable to strut and fret and miss out on opportunities, all in plain view of ourselves and each other. Only let me change my viewing station. Let me seek to comprehend my little life from far above and from far beyond this Pale Blue Dot, this Earth.
We are in truth made of star dust. It is more than a noble concept. That we are made of extinct stars is integral to us, to all living sentient beings. This dust we are made from confirms our diplomatic identity as ordinary members of the citizenry of the universe.
During our span on Earth we are concerned with truths closer to our five senses, closer to our daily lives.
It is easier to be present with breakfast in front of us than to make full frontal contact with the origins of the atomic composition of the molecules which breakfast represents.
We are survivors on this Earth. We individually survive. We strain with our innate instinct for self-preservation, with our desire to propel our genetic image beyond our own generation. We strain against risk of death in every form it takes, medical, malice, self-harm, accident, fire, flood, famine. We help one another survive.
We are bound to Earth as walkers by gravity. Seldom are we inclined to look up. If we see the stars, we will shortly look down to the land at our feet. To keep our balance becomes risky if we walk looking up at the starry night sky.
The objects we see in the sky show us that the objects on our planetary home are outnumbered by orders of magnitude utterly beyond our grasp.
The clue is in that fact the visible stars we see at night with our naked eyes are just a few thousand. Whereas, in stark contrast, our eyes can’t see the billions in our home galaxy, our Milky Way, and the improbably huge numbers in the universe at large.
I was about 12. I read avidly about astronomy. I used to force feed my head with visualisations of infinity – our place in the vast cosmos.
At some point, like many other children, I conjured up a crude vision of the extraordinary inverse proportions of my surroundings on Earth compared to Universal space.
As the years passed, I continued to satisfy by reading my thirst for knowledge of astronomical discoveries, with the widely broadcast research into cosmology, astrophysics and quantum physics.
Cosmology was, and still is my passion. This completely out of this world perspective, together with my almost daily practice of entering into the concept of death, the view of myself not alive, either before or after my lifespan, have become the third party, the confirmatory reference, my rock of rational vision.
These two awarenesses, my death and infinity, still fears, bring security, as well as sanity and comfort when Earthly events fail to calm my pain or to satisfy my curiosity.
I read into this quotation from Teilhard de Chardin that he sees all matter as interconnected and so replete with interdependence as to render fruitless the inspection of dissected portions.
Our Human interactions on planet Earth, however they blossom and flower, are bound by history as well as by gravity on this place where all life as we know it began.
In the history of ideas, we have relatively recently created the tools to study and open up our perspective to view places in time zones we have never inhabited, we hitherto could with difficulty imperfectly imagine.
Today people still argue over notional lines on maps, notional labels handed down from ancestral eras. We many of us give our undeviating agreement about the old ways we are to treat our dearest, or manage our attitudes to our nearest kin.
We do not take into account that those elders of ancient days knew about the microcosm of human existence, and they knew little or nothing of the generations of humankind in relation to the macrocosm.
They had no scale, no time-line by which to compare our collective births, lives and deaths with the birth and death of stars, galaxies and of matter itself.
They had but an inkling of the scale of the growth and development of populations all over the globe. In fact, in the world communities of settled, literate, commercially active populations, it was not possible till recently to even be aware of populations who lived elsewhere, nor could they have knowledge or appreciation of others’ different relationships with their own ecosystems.
We agreed to live by the rules they gathered to themselves from their limited knowledge of the finite resources of this planet and their necessarily restricted understanding of the effects on it of their exploitation of these resources, both human and material.
It holds true under close scrutiny by my intuition, if only for the one reason that I no longer am puzzled, or anxious, or carrying the same old unanswerable paradoxes around with me for more than fifty years.
People invest in fighting and killing with the same ancient tribal fervour. People fight for tribal reasons from the perceptions of one group that prioritises their need for territory and resources over another.
They who fought, those who died, used to die and fight in tragic ignorance of one simple fact.
Every living thing on this Earth is connected to every other life form by intricately and delicately balanced webs of interrelated interconnections.
This widespread and balanced planetary network of cause and effect has had a few thousand million years in which to become established. It is likely that such a type of stasis pre-exist in the universe at large, and it was a natural corollary to the formation of our Sun’s planetary system.
We have recently discovered that our human actions – we peoples of the Anthropocene – are the cause of such network disturbance as to threaten its stability. This is the stability necessary for Human Beings to continue to breathe, drink and sustain ourselves in the same way as we have been since we first struck two flints to make fire.
A very small number of men and women in this modern era – the Anthropocene – have had life-changing impressons of the three-hundred-and-sixty degree beauty of our Blue Planet.
They who have looked down at Earth from Earth orbit come back convinced that our ability to influence our long term fate is through the cross-border agreement and cooperation on the part of all inhabitants bar none.
The understanding of the scale of humanity in the universe is not some sort of amusing curiosity to lock up behind the walls of our museums. It is the stark reality of our common origins.
The early fables, myths and legends humans composed to understand and come to terms with the eternally unanswered questions about life on earth are today fabulous stories.
Yes, there are old ideas which may continue to cling to the newly expanded popularised astronomical imagery. Our place in the universe speaks its own message – oneness – a message so many more people today can find common ground with than in past eras.
I suggest all education, all media in all inhabited places be flooded with the discoveries of modern astronomy with the purpose of bringing humans into awareness of their third physical point of view: human-human-universe.
After I was exposed to the modern grasp of the full scale of the Cosmos, it will forever be entirely possible to reconcile my brief life as integrated into the fabric of the universe.
My friend was anxious to give adequate appropriate answers to her growing child’s ever more direct and specific questions about death, the end of life and the soul. My friend was anxious to give her child as much honest reassurance and wisdom as she feels he is capable of assimilating.
I said, “One thing that he will take from you and keep deep in his heart forever in these conversations are not the words you choose to reply with. What he will take is wordless. It is his perception of the light of joy that shines so bright from inside you, his Mother. It matters little how ‘accurate’ your replies, but how much love you show.”
We all die. We all question death. The way we put the great big questions to ourselves makes them insurmountable, unanswerable.
The big questions become reduced to manageable, comforting, comprehensible proportions when we replace with something far bigger the old, restricted, shrunken image of ourselves as individual units of temporary life, springing from uncountable unknown generations of exactly the same temporary units of living being.
Here is I, there were my parents, and there were my parents’ parents. On and on to a beginning so far back, all I have to keep is the idea of a beginning, and it is as remote from me as can be.
What else is there?
It might have been the sight of the trees growing, maturing, and disappearing in quick-time, fast forwards described dramatically in a scene from HG Wells amazing story, “The Time Machine”, which set me thinking about my own place in the landscape of existence.
The landscape of existence, when viewed from the perspective of a single observer over millions of seasons, becomes a metaphor for a new way of seeing death in terms of life, and life in terms of death.
I exist. Other sentient beings, like me, come and go. Who am I? What is my sentient existence, in an inevitable plurality of beings?
I see the continuum (only apparent to me for the duration of “me”) of the naturally occuring processes which constitute life in organisms great and small.
I see me as having been given/been infused with/been assumed into the life-force at my inception in the same manner as that blade of grass, this elephant, that newborn over there.
The unavoidable facts are that we arrive, we arise, we melt away. This precession of continuity has been the standard continuum of life for as long as organisms have been living. And dying.
These are facts I accept. I accept I am a manifestation of life’s continuum. My justification for writing such stuff as all this is that my acceptance of this concise description of what life and death is “works” for me.
I avoid varnishing my acceptance. As far as it is in my power, I will not ascribe meaning by labels to my condition of being alive, sharing life, while I am alive.
Like so many, I have wondered at my life of consciousness, which seems to be so centralised in me. My consciousness has its own Fool perched on my shoulder. It has an amygdala voice which says in my head, “You’re alive” or, more misleadingly, because it invites a dualistic bifurcated concept, “I’m alive”.
So I kept on fruitlessly asking the big questions about “my” life in me, and how this related, or equated with the life in others, alive now, who used to be alive, or who would at some future time be in life.
Then came the concept of the swarm.
An individual among similar individuals, like a tree, a bird, a human, is no less unique as a singular conscious living entity as the collective life of the sum total of its own kind.
I arose, I flower, I am to melt away.
I have no need whatever for creeping vines of significance, or encrusting jewels of verbal decoration. “I arose, I flower, I am to melt away.”
How did I acquire, how was I given, how was I assumed into the conscious sentience from which I appear to be observing, commenting, influencing the world in which I move?
If I think of putting these questions in front of me, it is to enter pointlessness. It is as if I am disrespecting the very gifts of this life. Wasted time is always regrettable. To imagine swathes of human populations waste time on pointless mental challenges over huge timescales is tragic.
Waste no time asking questions of time.
No question; Answer is before
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, far away from 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 mystery of life…
Dearest Friend It’s the choice now as it always was and always will be. Choose between fear and love.
This choice works in the easy way we control a car indicator and see it flicking on and off at our command.
Focus on this mental image because it’s worth the effort. It works.
I made this choice to choose love. At first it would have been an unconscious choice from my near death during my birth.
I was fortunate in my toddler years to have recurring flashbacks of my birth trauma.
Much later in life, I have begun to understand how my birth trauma gave me a conscious attachment to the positive aspects of life.
I share the life-view of people who have come close to death and whose outlook is changed from then on, and changed for good.
I believe my traumatic birth put me in touch with the primal urge for self-preservation.
Even before I had bonded with my Mother, her touch, her milk, my blind struggle to stay alive in life as I was born formed in me receptors to the primitive power of what people call the life force.
This is what Dylan Thomas described in his poem, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer.”
I have had a handful of epiphany experiences, some in my twenties some within these last five years.
These extreme events brought home to me that I have control over my choices – not simply to live – but to actively seek out, hold on to and clasp every positive event and experience which subsumes my observed self, overtakes and illuminates it from my inside.
In common with many people, I lived through long periods when hope and faith made their complete absence felt in ways that left me feeling imprisoned and only partially alive.
My view in hindsight shows me how my birth was a struggle not to die. And the consequence is that, even in my darkest days, I realise I have been tuned to go towards all those relishable, cherishable, and highly valued life-affirmations.
So now I take care to make choices so that I am in a position in my moment-to-moment living to be alert and aware and accepting of all the light outside that has the potential to turn into light inside me.
I’m 72. Or as one Facebook friend has put it, more than twenty-six thousand days into life.
Consider the stark divergence between what your heart is telling you it is and what it wants for you, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the range of challenges, hardships, trials, burdens, shame, grief, semi-dead guilt, unhealed wounds, and yet more awfulness that appear crisp and clear, rising unbidden in full colour 3-D in the great shop window of your mind.
Consider the divergence from these two realities. There is the reality of the heart’s willing private, intimate conversation of a love so tender it literally flows on out of sight.
And there is the reality of the self-sabotaging, self-destructive, self-deprecating obstacles that the mind is ever ready to remind you are immediate, present, and still sore and unresolved; obstacles which the mind – ever pointlessly malicious – invites you to pick up, full of stabbing poison.
Of these two realities, one can always make itself available, and it comes complete with replayed real life unbearable experiences, haunting unwanted personages, dialogues, scenery and all the trappings of the stage of horrors.
Of these two realities, one is utterly impossible to touch, see, smell, hear or feel. It is in consequence hard to hold in view… But it is possible to choose to sense it at will and it is possible to fully enter into a deep and fulfilling conversation with it at the drop of a hat, whether you are sick or healthy, even in torment, trial or tribulation.
Your eyes, my eyes, our habit of us all is to regard the future quite a lot. Those real time issues and challenges you must face. You do have to face them. Often they are completely inescapable and if we repeatedly junk the opportunity such challenges present, we diminish ourselves repeatedly.
In just such a piecemeal way we can junk our entire lives, future, and past, till nothing in the present has value, nothing seems to matter, except (tragically) the absence or termination of not-caring.
But isn’t it a strange and true fact that a sane mind just cannot openly will itself to deny its present?
The present is the point of balance, the spring where the seed of life, love, and of all that is pure, worthy and regenerating actually resides.
It is the fact of the overarching sheer bigness of the present that makes both the unignitable past and the vapours of the future redeemable.
So try to embrace the challenges with love, not fear. The future is for making choices in. This human nest of love, where like meets like, is key. It is “where it’s at”.
The focus is on this instant, and as powerfully as possible. Concentrate in the same way you unleash your own colours and patterns on your creative tides, big or little.
The achievement of a state of grace is normally via the hardest, twistiest, longest of roads.
It is useful to visualise yourself as a small person on these paths, holding hands with your heart, expecting, not wishing or longing, for the beauty to show itself in the next turn of the way.
There is one special knack to use to help jam the illusory gates to your prison open. Using it will sooner or later dissolve the gates and all barriers, like mist under the summer Sun at dawn.
It is to hold hands with your heart.
Let go. Allow yourself to see and be joyfully recognised by the fantastically beautiful person you are: your heart knows this.
If you smile at and hold hands with the heart of yours, you will hear it tell you exquisite, feverish love stories – all about you!
All your heart ever wants is to tell you it loves you. You are dearly loved EveryNow.
Choose love. In thought word and deed choose to actively deploy and harness the entire dictionary, orchestration and spectrum of love.
I have been quoting this by Julian of Norwich inwardly for four decades, and it is one of my Fixed Stars: “All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well” … ❤️
I truly wish my words may fill up your heart with love, dear Friend.
I remind you, you have set out courageous and have begun to confront dark barriers which old traumas and sorrows have solidified into blocks on your path.
Some of these horrid monoliths you have grown accustomed to carrying about with you wherever you go, wherever you are.
This is hard work, exhausting and lonely. There is no relief. The sad thing is, in the end, your beautiful lovable self can curl up and shrink out of sight.
And now I remind you that I still believe in Epiphany.
Being drenched by a spontaneous experience of this magnitude can take a person into a state of raised consciousness, regardless of unresolved internal obstacles.
Here is a place, a state of vibrant new awareness, where there is a continuous, powerful, conscious intuitive connection between oneself and the origin of all life.
This is a sudden inrush into the heart of life force – peace and love – from which all life springs and to which all life returns.
The heart floods with love. Very quickly the lovelight shows up the years, months and days lived in the shade.
Here is the source of a waterfall of Healing.
I liken this potential to enter into transformative awakening, this state of grace by an epiphany, to an arrival at a Portal, as depicted so graphically in ‘Stargate’, the sci-fi series.
However, there is a price to pay. No one steps through such a Portal casually. It takes courage and determination, sometimes born out of desperation and repeated suffering, to embark on such a rite of passage.
A person who has acknowledged and begun a journey of self-discovery, this person is unavoidably on course to rediscover the lovable, as well as the loving self.
The loving self I say, because you know you love and you have loved, and you can love. Giving such as this comes rather naturally.
Can you be loved so willingly in these familiar ways by your own self? In a nutshell, can you love yourself?
Can you “be love” ?
Some call the opening of a significant life journey a falling in love again with the self.
“Again” because the original self “is” love. The early human baby, to whom the future has no meaning, is all about present immediacy. This new being inhabits the space, the playground of love.
Here in this primal arena is also hunger, thirst, desire for security, in whatever order.
The reason (if such an abstraction has any meaning in the context of a newborn) why such primal needs excite us so much is simply that they sustain life.
This is life lived at no remove at all from the life instinct – the will to live, the will to continue to survive. This condition of mind is primitive, urgent, exciting.
And I say it is very beautiful. Indeed it is one of the openings into beauty.
Every sentient being on Earth – in the sea, on land, in the air – lives at this intense level.
Some time later, at the stage of independence, once the need is implanted as a result of whatever life circumstances, banal or dramatic, to discover some answers to Who, What, even Why I “am”, the path at your feet may become luminous and fertile with a rather mysterious sense of promise.
This feeling of being onto something exciting is present for the straightforward reason that there is a strong intuition that some kind of fulfilment is just round the corner.
The possibility of resolution becomes attainable, because you visualised it, called out to it, cried out for it.
All life is interconnected. All interconnections stem from one source. The source is terrific, powerful and overwhelmingly beautiful, and we hear this spoken by many from various directions from time imemorial.
In unity, Humanity has raised its face to this millennial truth. This is how it is.
Little wonder that having stepped out on the pilgrimage to self realisation, the ground begins to tremble, and the urge to continue is irresistible.
The stage is reached where only a hair trigger stimulus will be enough to slam the seeker into a brilliant way of seeing.
Or not!
Epiphany experiences are in rather short supply!
It may happen little by little. A person grows quietly into a new place of understanding and acceptance, with, “So that’s it.” With a few aha’s.
It may happen quickly, like a dam burst. There is no avoiding, no postponing, no ignoring the approach of light, the flowering of the vision of life in grand abundance, and, with this release, laughter and the deep sense of joy-in-residence.
I so truly wish these blessings on you with all my soul’s strength, my dear Friend.
At the lighting of dawn’s light I saw with speechless horror that night had turned its back on me and would not shield me from view.
And so I understood my time had arrived.
I completely gave up the impossible battle with myself.
The pain stopped. It stopped like a drawn out shriek run out of breath.
Courage took hold and I dared to start over with no assumptions, no power of control.
The words and deeds I had been in such desperate need of found expression in my throat.
I found I could act on the deeds I had thought were utterly beyond my capacity.
I walked forward. It was a never before. It was an ever-after. It was unimportant if it was day or if it was night. I stepped into my power. A fish that moves by barely moving, and then is not seen!
Words don’t fail me now.
Words return from their pilgrimage beyond the distant horizon where I know my soul extends, and they break in salty surf on the beach – faithful, compliant, rhythmic.
ALL SHALL BE WELL; AND ALL SHALL BE WELL; AND ALL MANNER OF THING SHALL BE WELL [Julian of Norwich]
I never look back since that long fruitless night of prayer.
I do nothing to light the way.
The way is lit.
The way is inexpressibly beautiful always.
I choose thoughts, because I can.
I choose long and hard, enough that I dwell on thoughts of love.
I choose to look out for the vocabulary of love.
I choose the means to make the mouth of the mind clear for loving.
I give no home in my mouth to words of fear or hate.
So choose!
Be bold enough to speak out loud about love, always and everywhere.
One fine day, you will pause, and you will see a beautiful person steps to meet you.
A beautiful figure treads a path that lights up all by itself with neither conscious nor unconscious volition.
The View at 72+ 