Tag: identity

Life that is more heart♡centric?

Not invisible indivisible

How to have life that is more heart-centric?

A friend may answer the question like this, “By being more present – for others – and in the course of this, for myself.”

I say a life more heart-centered in the terms described, “for others”, may derive from an imposed, expected, socially acceptable requirement.

I didn’t seek to live my life from the heart. It happened that my heart was revealed to me, in a sudden and shocking way. This was mediated through the extraordinarily powerful joining of prolonged eye-contact one-to-one, during wordless partnering in Biodanza.

I was briefly invited to share with another person our most sacred innermost spaces where the heart dwells. This can elicit a response in both people. I saw the shining integrity (non-judgemental, undifferentiated wholeness) in the soul of another. I saw the purity of the shine which the soul emits.

During those same shared moments, I felt my identity melt away. It became airy, then transparent. I felt dizzy, as when there is a sudden absence of old familiar coordinates to rely on. I teared up, because what I was seeing clear as daylight for the first time were these fine human characteristics. Integrity, honesty, and trust.

The greatest of these is trust. So much of the foundations, scaffolding and structures of functional society and of the wholesome individual are based on trust. Where there is trust, hope, growth and love can flourish.

I felt the avalanche of an emotion which was not love for another person. It was non-attached love. Love not disembodied at all, but grounded, real, rooted deeply and from time immemorial. I did not fully recognise it at that time (early 2013).

What I later grasped was that I had touched into, or received, a taste of the original life-force which keeps my life alive and guards both itself and myself with the power that comes from the place where I was born, and to which you, I and we all are returning, yes, each at our own pace, but as one human Tribe of sentient beings.

It has a well-known effect, this shared time of eye-gazing. Only it so happens that I was at a threshold when my heart, which I had been cloaking from even my own view for 66 years, shone reflected back to me from the heart of another. I was not “blown away”. I was literally blown open.

Firstly, I’m lucky that this awakening occured at all. Many may live and end life without this sort of revelation of the one-ness of all existence. This vision of one-ness is too powerful to frame in words. It is to be experienced, to be lived. It’s like electric current present in a copper wire. I know it’s there. Once my hand touches the wire, the shock through my body transmutes my knowledge into pure experience.

Secondly, my heart remained and remains open. My personal impression is that a heart opened can never fully close again. Some may arrive in a space which is heart-centric, abide there for a while, and then in some way or other they deny, discount or disregard their experience, simply because they lack sufficient first-hand knowledge of the life of the living heart of life.

I am incredibly lucky on two counts.

After all, when living is and always has been plain sailing from day to day, what useful purpose can be served, disturbing the expectation of the routine, by placing a hand on a live wire? I thought I knew what ecstacy is. It is like a cause and effect, isn’t it? And when the cause is absent, ecstacy vanishes.

My ecstatic experience of being alive does not depend on an external cause. For a long, long time I had been seeking to understand what causes ecstatic experience. I made strenuous and continual efforts to get under the skin, to get into the mind, to attempt to MELD with the living aliveness I see is present in every other life form around me. This process of enquiry resolves itself by reforming itself into a process of self-enquiry.

How is it possible that I am both alive and life is living me?

I am alive and life is living through me as well as in me. This is sufficient cause to be swirling, pulsing with the ecstacy of life lived all of the time, day and night, in fullest possible awareness.

I am alive and not dead. This alone warrants lusty songs of gratitude. Yes, I am grateful I am not dead!

My heart is beating. It is beating like every heart that is, was, and will be. This force that keeps the beat from embryo to this very moment is not mine alone. Mine is a share of the same life force whose origins are traceable along the whole route through scientific investigation (and common sense) to the Big Bang

“The Gentleness of Being”

🌀Dissolution catalyses reality🌪️

“The Gentleness of Being”

The fun of it is there is always a first person story in the third person identity.

Over time, I’ve retrained my point of view, so everywhere I am seeing the “I” in the she, the he, the you and the it.

In this way, I access with great pleasure the tremendous shock of the new where there was only the same old same old.

That old joke of the greeting between psychiatrists, “You’re okay, and how am I?” amuses because of the odd transposition of views. When I enter my doctor’s surgery, my greeting is, “How are you today, Doctor?”

Walking outside anywhere, seeing and sensing sentient life, insects, birds, pets, cattle or the vegetable world, there is no harm in asking, “What is going through your mind? What am I to your view? The sun and the moon, the wind and rain, what are they to you now?”

These questions work well when addressed to a stone in the street, a river in the country, clouds in the sky, even an active volcano over the horizon. 

The thought-thinking “I-node” becomes curiously calm and joyful, when I try to join with the conversations of the being of those who are “not-I”. 

Out and about, I try in one way or another to shed a portion of the importance of my identity. Attention directed outside of myself and towards the otherness in others lets me see, in all things living and not alive, the bas-relief of the urge to survive and the factual evidence of survival.

As I approach each and every alive person in this peculiarly unaccustomed un-selfreferential way, I sense the white heat of the Will to Live in them.

My own heart, also concerned with not being not-alive, relaxes and fills with a compassionate gentleness all over again. 

Though they outnumber me, yet the myriad diverse multiplicity of others does not dwarf me, it completes me!

When I become attentive to and am aware of  “The Gentleness of Being”, I feel that the huge and welcoming universe of Heart’s Love is brought forward into my view by the interaction of these two everyday accessible attributes – Gentleness and Being. 

Electricity crackles

Sparks fly

one is all and all is one

https://everynow.blog/2018/08/19/glory-to-your-glory-morning-glory/
Love's
presence 
E v e r yN o w

A buzz boomed by with a bee in it

[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.

~ Love’s grace is present EveryNow

The stasis of bliss

🐣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!

~ Love is present EveryNow

Bliss := Peace

*The Quality of the Present*

*The Quality of the Present*

Deep awareness of the present moment feels both strange and free.

In me there is a kind of inner lake. The lake now contains waves and now has turbulence subsided. I am at once the lake and a person gazing on the lake. My identity is both, and both are essential to me.
There is calmness, but with no particular colour. The quality of the present is like this, I feel. It takes on the colour of the moment. It is like water which is not held in any container. It is like the next breath of air which is inhaled. There is no existence to the air as a “before inhalation”. The inhalation, as far as it can be framed as such, is its own life-giving self.
The present does not stain, nor will it be tainted, because the present continually returns to silence.
The present returns to its own nature, with the dignity and simplicity of a deer who, satisfied there is nothing untoward external to itself, gently lowers its head to graze again.
The present holds no sense of itself. It is in a curious way truly Entity Without Identity.
For me nowadays, there is no emotional attachment or colour to my experience of “now”. But oh, there used to be! Sometimes the chaos of competitors for attention had the garishness of a haunted house fairground ride.
I’m talking about jaw-clenched lurches towards shapeshifting colours of eagerly or anxiously anticipated futures, and the imagined burns and shivers from hot and cold cauldrons of endless swirling pasts.
All of that was attachment. It was attention misdirected or distracted away from the Moment. In a word, all that was “pain”. Pain, unnecessary, useless, worthless, senseless. And in the final reckoning, most remarkably, avoidable pain.

~ Love is present EveryNow