Tag: illusion

“If we can stay in the heart, …

A friend mused, “If we can stay in the heart, I think every day would be beautiful.”

The wonderful thing is that we are there. The heart is our natural born home. It always was and will always be so. Here is where bliss is. Bliss of the most peaceful and unassuming and abundant kind.

Your heart and mine and all hearts share a portion of the love and peace from which arose all beings, animate, inanimate, sentient or not, and to which all are always returning.

If I get out from under my own feet, if I begin to truly see the laughably illusory nature of the images of the obstacles my mind chooses to scatter on my days and nights, then the trip-hazards in my personal Heads Up Display, the disparaging self-images my mind constructs, and which lie littering my way, all, all, all evaporates before my eyes.

If I learn about who I am, from others first, from serious academic study, and then by observing my own image in these reflections, I clear my unknowing, I open my mind to believe the best of myself.

It is my unknowing which invites mental constructions to explain the unknown, and so I am inclined to measure my worth by reference to explanations derived from socially accepted norms.

As I seek stability and comfort and refuge from these unknowns, I tend to label my fears as things external to my being, and not of my own making. By directing my attention on this naming, I am turning my back on the source of peace, harmony, balance, light and love. The source is in my own heart. It’s always ready to welcome me in like a faithful and passionate lover.

My heart releases an avalanche of self-esteem and self-confidence. It colours my days with my favourite colours. It shows up on demand like my bestie with a loving smile and with a gaze no vision of an angel can match

¡ Freeing myself from my illusion of lack of self worth!

 ¡ Freeing myself from my illusion of lack of self worth! 


Last week in the guided relaxation at the end my Yoga class, my teacher was reminding me to thank my lungs for their ability to breathe, to thank my heart for its vital sustain of rhythm, and then she suggested I be thankful to my Soul!

Well I never did hear the like of such a thing before!
Nevertheless, I duly went to my soul and I was thankful.

That’s when I saw the image of an eye form in my mind. 

It was like a black and white artist’s pencil drawing. Undramatic, realistic. Just  this eye gently looking off to the left. I saw it has bushy eyebrows. This was my eye! I was seeing the gentleness in me as others may see it, but I was gazing appreciatively for the first time at serious, nice “me”.

My surprise dissolved the image. However, I was still in a deeply relaxed state, and so I returned to look, still with my eyes closed, at the pleasant sight of the the rest of my own features began to take shape as well.

I had the reaction, “Did you see that!” as of someone in the front seat of a car, who turns round to say to the person on the back seat, who has seen and who knows.

Ever since I had this incontrovertible confirmation of me as my own friend and companion, my heart has been singing new and carefree tunes. I say “ever since” … it’s only been three days!

Wild lamentations of personal grief 

There is a field of human endeavour identifiable by the vocabulary of its skeletal airtight constructs and its conceptual legal abstractions.

There are entities, such as the Law, and Organisations, Associations and Companies, which owe the basis of their existence to definitions alone.
Their state of being rests on highly polished words with small areas of meaning embedded in permissive agreements, which themselves hang uninfluenced by Newton’s law of universal gravitation in the air of abstraction.
Read rejection into redundancy? Read earthquake into termination? I say it can be most illuminating to read post-holder into employee!
During the 80’s and 90’s, I was the subject of five redundancies.
My first was a revelation. It was a blue-sky day in May. I returned from Iunch hour to my desk punctually at 2pm. I had had many praises for my work in sales, which was a new departure for me, as I was more used to general clerical work.
I was summoned to the company boardroom. Here the Managing Director and the Finance Director sat at the long hardwood table. At five past two, here I was served with a notice of redundancy.
It was to be the first of five in the next couple of years.
I was struck by the wild lamentations of personal grief of other work colleagues at the sudden shock of receiving their own notices of redundancy.
They regarded their company as a second family, and ascribed familial affections, loyalties or aversions to some of their co-workers.
I knew a couple of people who suffered badly from the shock of redundancy, never able to handle this technical act of Letting Go. I saw one man descend immediately into the abyss of mental torment, compounded by alcohol and drug abuse.
I witnessed his appalling spiralling losses, first of financial independence, soon family breakup, health issues compounded by a drunken fall downstairs leading to surrender to depression, domestic squalor and isolation.
Within three hours on that lovely spring day in May 1988, I had fulfilled my desire to drive to the flower-filled Cannizaro Park during normal working hours, and I made a photographic study, in serene solitude, of the fabled alleyway of Golden Rain blossom.
I had also had a consultation with a lawyer to verify the validity of the terms of my redundancy, and I had arranged my first job interview!
I call myself fortunate to clearly see an employing company for what it is, an abstract legal construct.
I see myself, an employee, simply as the holder of a post. I was never family, I never had the right to any other reward for what I did when I occupied that post beyond the narrow boundaries of the definitions which proscribed me there.
In the technical jargon, the word redundancy is rinsed of all human connotations, such as hugs or kisses, and signifies the point when two parties are deemed to agree they have arrived at the point when they no longer are bound by their contract of obligation to one another.
It was sad to see such quantities of unnecessary emotion expended when the lives of some of my office friends were felt so strongly uprooted in this way.

Woe to people who mistake the abstract definitions of others for the reality of their own existence, for they waste their time sleepwalking blind, eyes open only to their illusion!