Tag: Zen

THE ODD THING ABOUT ACCIDENTS

A cardboard box was in the middle of the pavement. I kicked at it. My leg fell into the coal hole whose cover had been removed. I had to go and have stitches to the cut.

Kick it!

This was 1974. I had come out of my rented flat near Gloucester Road Tube, in West London. I have no doubt I had been pranked and cruelly so.

Any person walking there on that day could have been the one injured. The key to it is in the “could have been”. The future perfect conditional is the closest description of my accident. It was waiting to happen to me. The part I played in it was really rather incidental.

When people say, “Everything happens for a reason”, I disagree. In the universe of time, I say, “Everything happens!” Simply because happenings happen, their sufficiency is self-contained. The richness of the moment of what happens floods my consciousness with joys unending.

The list of circumstances which set me up for this fall is as lengthy and varied as those which could equally have existed and resulted in no fall at all.

I can easily call to mind incidents (a nice neutral word) in which I was involved in road accidents, as the driver, as a passenger, or a pedestrian. My gratitude at having survived these few occasions of danger has close similarities to my gratitude for waking up safe and well every new day among my family and friends.

What chain of consequences might have followed after I kicked that cardboard box in 1974? My tibia could have fractured, causing immediate, severe pain. Poor medical treatment or infection could have left me with deformity or walking instability, and my life might have changed forever.

None of this happened. The point is that I almost never think back to that day. When I go there, I give no thought to what might have been. I never think about the person who set up the trap.

Where is this train of thought about events of a life threatening nature leading me, I wonder?

in my EveryNow blog posts, I write without dissembling or self-delusion about revisiting and rediscovering my time as a baby, child and adolescent.

I have come across no factors in my history which severely warped or misdirected my ability to maintain my identity and to lead a full productive life.

This life my parents constructed for me was primed for my safety and security. I cannot claim against them or blame them for laying foundations of my life based on anything other than human goodness and compassion.

Goodness and compassion

I now understand I was equipped in rudimentary ways which I would not have been fully aware of as I entered the age of reason and self-awareness, to cleave to the source of my own humanity, compassion and inner peace.

My core being had never been subject to threat or ill-treatment. Curiously enough, that fact felt like a disadvantage when I compared myself to my peers, some of whom were savvy and street wise, one or two even street fighters.

I had periods of deep depression in my early 20s. I was hospitalised. My parents great fear was that I might lose my independent ability as an adult to take care of my basic needs.

Today I am retired. In the foreseeable future I see nothing stands in the way of a healthy married life, with children, grandchildren and more loyal friends than at any previous time in my life.

I see no single factor or event in my life story which prevented me from falling into ruin, whether physical ruin or psychological degradation.

In 1965, I wonder what held me back from refusing my girlfriend’s offer of shooting up her heroin? Caution, cowardice, informed fear? All of these.

In 1982, I was confronted by a massive and tragic life altering situation. I had clear choices. I could give up trying to fight my side for my future, not ask for help, and walk away. Without doubt I would have reverted to being a nobody, wretched and diminished perhaps for life.

Faced with a clear and present danger, I fought as hard as I knew how to fight. Against the odds, I saved myself and others from the brink of a disaster whose consequences would have damaged at least three lives, possibly beyond repair.

Flame that burns, consuming nothing

Nature affects the assumptions I make about the frames of reference I am equipped with. Nurture affects how I allocate and deploy the choices I make according to what I believe is best for myself and others.

I’m talking about the cultivation of a belief system linked to my personal view of the world I live and move around in, in relation to the most sacred centre of my integrity.

I have been composing my EveryNow blog posts and showing them on my Facebook pages since 2018. I now have readers in roughly 30 countries.

EveryNow speaks for itself. The belief systems that it relies on and navigates by come from never ending sources of ancient established spirituality. I hardly know what labels apply. The structures owe their existence to Zen, Taoism, Apophatic Mysticism, and to good old Powers of Positive Thinking, amongst others.

My story about the lessons I’ve learned from the Cardboard Box episode shows me that I have nothing that is specially of my own making to impart to the world.

I don’t intend to convert, or evangelise. My day to day, moment to moment intense experience of being alive and in Life, so heightened by my sudden unforeseen heart openings of 2013 — the Year of my Life — continue to need sharing to the best of my ability.

I proffer no message, hold out no quick fix. I am convinced that the epiphanies I have lived are available as positive transformative experiences to other people.

I am so graced by the massive shifts in my life, I will not ignore them, nor keep them to myself.

I am just this guy with his blog and the delicious sense of being on fire with love flames that burn, burn, and consume nothing. I am not about promotion. I am about sharing at high visibility with maximum openness.

I hope my readers will be motivated to read on, when they strongly feel that life in any formulation or format is worth continuing to live and enjoy EveryNow

~ Love is present EveryNow

AUTHOR’S PREFACE TO EVERYNOW

PETER PILLEY REFLECTS ON EVERYNOW

EveryNow author

A portal to life’s glory opened to me in an unexpected and brilliant burst of inception in February 2013. It engulfed me, Peter Pilley, and straight away began to transform me. Some time passed before I discovered that I was experiencing an epiphany, a heart opening.

This wash of unknown emotions and revelations was so utterly new, when I tried to open my mouth to talk about this state of grace, I could not find the words in English! Slowly, I came to realise what had opened would forever remain open.

EveryNow speaks for itself. I write about the cultivation of a belief system linked to my personal view of the world I live in, in relation to the most sacred centre of my integrity. The belief systems my writings rely on and navigate by come from never-ending sources of ancient established spirituality. I hardly know what labels apply. The structures owe their existence to Zen, Taoism, Apophatic Mysticism, and to good old Powers of Positive Thinking, amongst others.

My day to day, moment to moment, intense experience of being newly alive and in life began with a starburst of gentleness. This delicious newness continues to demand I share it to the best of my ability.

I say the epiphanies I have lived can be available as positive transformative experiences to other people. My life story as I know it tells me I have nothing uniquely of my own making to impart to the world. I am so graced by the massive shifts in my life, I will not ignore them, nor keep them to myself. I am all about sharing, like friends, wonder-struck, in a scented, colourful garden for the first time.

I am just this guy with his blog and the delicious sense of being on fire with love flames that burn and consume nothing.

After this epiphany in 2013, I researched online, close questioned friends. I began to write a digital journal. I searched with urgent intensity to tease out meaning from my new condition of incandescent awareness.

During my first six doldrum decades, I neglected to hold communion with my heart. I had contented myself with “Living to Love”, which is pretty, but superficial. I knew I loved loving. I thought it enough to believe in love. My daily search for love was dedicated, thorough and systematic.

A time comes when the search for love somewhere outside of me becomes plainly pointless, like chasing shadows. When I begin Loving to Live from the heart is when I start to be remade whole again, which means I join in with humanity as yet another “Pixel of Humanity”

Today I am at peace and at ease with my experience of being alive in this completeness of sentience in the moment, a gift I call EveryNow. It amazes me how it still feels as astonishing, secure and as unremittingly brand new as it did at the start of my unforeseen gentle earthquake in 2013.

My EveryNow blog is not here to change you. I am not about promotion. I proffer no message, hold out no quick fix lists. You can read it as an organic journey of awakening. It may let you believe that the bliss and rooted peace which has found a happy home in me, can be yours too, if you “let go”, if you experiment with trying to avoid judgement, or stop discarding one choice over another. The potential at the birth of all choices has equal value. 

It can be enough to “Chat to Things”. Concentrate your senses with fierce, daily and above all uncritical, unconditional loving attention on all the tiny nearby things and beings, wherever you sit, stand, walk or travel. And then? Will they chat back at you?

In 2018, my journal turned into the EveryNow blog, which you can see on www.everynow.blog by WordPress. I now have readers in roughly 30 countries. I am still adding to it. It’s rooting, branching, ever growing, much like a garden.

Mine are the everyday stories of someone who is daily willingly reliving the trauma of massive heart opening. I write of love, compassion and praise for the glories o9f living from the heart. I illustrate my blog posts mostly with my own photos or artwork.

Sieze the joy

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

Under the influence

On Thadée Pilley’s indirect influence on my life.

My Father was a conference interpreter. Over thirty and more years he travelled four continents extensively for his work. He once counted 56 countries visited.

He recognised his privileged life, and it was a great joy to him to be able to give full reign to his boyish passion for exploration.

In the late 1940s, when on interpretation assignments in Europe, he would travel on the plane with his favourite form of instant transport – the collapsible Corgi scooter [photo].

In the more far away countries, once the day’s session was done, he didn’t hang around at the hotel as most people on business do. He’d hire a motor scooter, and dive deep, often at random, into town and countryside to discover places and things, and to meet people.

The Collapsible Corgi Scooter

He would regularly land himself into adventures. Most were quirky, weird and wonderful, some led him into real physical danger, injury even. His extractions formed part of the climax of his travellers tales.

He would enjoy retelling his incredible exploits over a meal at family get-togethers. He was an excellent raconteur and he loved holding ‘centre stage’.

Sadly, I remember only the outlines of a very few of my late Father’s famous stories.

In the heyday of the Cold War spy era, the best spy camera, as featured in classic fiction, was the German made Minox. My Dad carried a Minox in each pocket, one for black and white, one for colour, capacity 50 high quality 8mm photos on every film.

He was an amateur with a gift for subject, composition and timing. He accumulated a large collection of real, not tourist, travel images.

I am proud to be the custodian of his photos and colour transparencies. I hope to digitise these.

His professional working hours demanded intense concentration. It was a kind of “letting off steam” for him to use his free time abroad to visit as many culturally interesting places and events as he could cram into his work days in all these far-flung countries.

If a museum he might chance to find were unfortunately closed, he would find the key holder and by his charm and diplomacy be granted sole access out of hours.

I have witnessed for myself his cheeky refusal to take no for an answer. His ever active curiosity would draw him towards official notices such as, Private Keep Out, Closed, No Admittance, Authorised Persons Only. He regarded these as his personal and exclusive welcome signs.

My Dad, my Mother and I aged 6 or 7, were walking in Amsterdam on a Sunday. In those days, Sunday meant “closed”.

I remember standing in front of the imposing black double doors of the Rijksmuseum in the early morning, while my Father pressed the bell. One of the doors opened. A conversation took place in Dutch. The door closed behind us. We had the entire museum to ourselves.

My memory of this is strong, because we hadn’t had breakfast, I had no interest in my cavernous surroundings, I was simply a tired little boy. So I attached myself to one of my Father’s ankles (I can still see his trouser turnups!) and he dragged me gallantly along the highly polished parquet of the museum gallery floors!

One of my own such stories, inspired by my Father’s example, is of just such a fortuitous and memorable personal guided tour of a prehistoric grotto in the Dordogne. A long car journey brought me at 4 o’clock to the small ticket office of a Crystal Grotto with prehistoric drawings.

The man was closing up for the day. I told him why I had come so far to see his cave. Age 8, while my late father was chatting to him, I had sat on the knee of one of the four brothers, the original discoverers of the now world famous Grotte de Lascaux. Please, after a lifetime of waiting, would the Guardien kindly let me see this cave? He agreed, and he enjoined me not tell a soul!

In the early 1960’s, my father began to bring me gifts back from his travels. There were exotic musical instruments and vinyl LPs too. This is how I discovered and became fascinated by the strange sounds of classical music from the Middle East, West Africa, India, China, Indonesia, Japan and indigenous Australia.

One of the most appealing to me was Balinese Gamelan music. To my ears it is full of the natural sounds and rhythms that fill the air in a fauna and flora-rich rain forest. Birds, insects, rain, and stones clunking under waterfalls.

Gamelan orchestra

These sounds are woven into expressions of mystical animism embroidered with reverence by highly disciplined musicianship, refined by successive influences down dozens of centuries from a mix of old traditions from all around this south-east Asian land.

As a young teenager, these cultural novelties had a trickle effect on me, like the magic of light from stained glass windows shining in on me.

My curiosity led me to read up on Buddhism, and the Japanese practice of Zen.

From the time when I was a toddler, I have continued weaving patterns from the strong thread of the love of all living things growing ‘out there’ in the Big Green.

The Zen view opened a channel for my Green awareness.

My Father’s cheerful convictions that there is never any valid reason to take no for an answer, that in reality anything and everything is possible to you with the right way of thinking, using the right formulation of words, sank into me from early on.

I am sure now the grounding effect of these and other assimilated influences not only sculpted my life path, but on occasions actually helped to save my life.