Dynamite Thought

Here’s a thought.

1. You are not who you think you are. What you think you are is just a thought. But when you think about it, you know you’re not a thought.

2. There’s a consciousness and an awareness that is there beneath your thoughts, even the thought of who you think you are. It’s the one thing you cannot deny, because it’s not a thought.

3. That consciousness is what you really are. Everything else is just a thought, a dream, a story. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Just this three-part thought alone is enough to change the dream forever, in fact, deconstruct the dream completely. That’s how thoughts work in the dream.

They come to you from someplace else and plant themselves. Whether their effect is great or small is determined by what other thoughts they mix with.

In the world of the dream, a single thought can be everything.

Think about it.

And That’s the (Unbelievable) Truth

Our so-called lives are as substantial as a thought. For our lives are exactly that: thoughts.

We have created our world with thoughts.

The natural world, although original within itself, is filtered in our perception by our thoughts; a tree does not call itself a tree. While the built world is a world of thought made physical. Even the world of culture and society is one constructed out of thought.

In this way, it can be said our lives are dreams.

Moreover, in this way, our lives can be seen as a string of thoughts, beginning with those of our parents, then teachers, friends, peers, and so on from Adam to ad infinitum.

In this way, it can be seen that not only is our life a dream, it isn’t even our own dream.

However.

There is a reality beyond this dream, one that cannot be said, one that cannot be contained by thought, but one that contains all thought and all.

By some act of grace, there has been a wisdom in this world of dreams which has pointed to this reality. It points because it cannot be said. It points with subtle thought.

That thought is this and only this: surrender.

Surrender all belief in any thought (especially in that thought of personal identity we call ego).

In this way, the dream deconstructs. Then it is understood there never was a dream.

And no thoughts. No grace. No pointers. No surrender. Even no deconstruction.

Only Being-Consciousness-Bliss. Only That. Or what some in the dream call God. And You Are That.

The Paradox of Doing

We pride ourselves on free will. But that’s an illusion like all illusion.

A tree grows in the direction of the sun and veers with wind and snow and a thousand other deflections.

Add a million thoughts to the brew, and there we are.

But nothing is random; everything is part of the overall pattern.

So there is nothing to do but surrender. Any other so-called doing only causes friction, suffering. And even that is part of the overall pattern.

Then we play our parts the best we can. We pay attention to intuition and influence, insight and signs, and guide our movements accordingly, knowing full well there’s nothing else we can do. In fact, there’s absolutely nothing we can do.

And so we do it. No regrets and no attachment: it’s all part of the the pattern after all.

Dreaming New Year Resolution

Skating on New Year's Eve

They're skating on this firm unwavering pond
inside a cemetery, between lush pines
and fields of gravestones. There's not much beyond
but pale horizon and some faint designs
created by a mist above the sea.
Still nothing in the air dampens their fun.
No worries freeze their blur of activity;
nothing required is setting with the sun.
Instead, maintaining balance on a small
knife's edge, they need make no new resolutions
except this one: not fearing their own fall.
So some are sketching circles in the ice,
figure eights, or other revolutions.
Others draw their straight lines once or twice.

~Son Rivers 2003

Taos Meditation: Frank Waters on Ramana

Here I stand, sniffing the early morning breeze and spying out the vast landscape like an old coyote, as if to assure myself I am in the center flow of its invisible, magnetic currents. To the sun, and to the two oppositely polarized peaks, El Cuchillo and the Sacred Mountain, I offer my morning prayers. Then, letting the bright warming rays of the sun engulf me, I give myself up to a thoughtless silence.

One, I suppose, could call it meditation. I don’t, for I’m not sure how one is supposed to meditate. Once, I attended an hour’s talk on meditation given by a noted esotericist from England. He carefully explained the best hours of the day to observe it; how to choose a corner of the room; what kind of a religious painting or photograph to hang on the wall with a burning candle beneath it; the choice of the proper incense to burn; the posture to assume. By then his hour was up. I left the hall, thinking of a question that Dr. Evans-Wentz once had asked Sri Ramana Maharshi, the famous sage of India.

“Is it helpful to sit on a tiger’s skin?” he asked. “Should one sit in the lotus position, or may the legs be kept straight? What posture is best?”

“All of this is unnecessary,” the Maharshi answered. “Let the mind assume the right posture. That is all.”

It is enough for me, as a prelude to a busy day, to attain for a moment at sunrise a measure of unbroken silence, of profound stillness within.

~Frank Waters from ‘Mountain Dialogues’

Jesus on Nonduality

When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same, so that the male not be male nor the female female; and when you fashion eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, and a likeness in place of a likeness; then will you enter the kingdom.

from The Gospel of Thomas

Peace for Christmas

In The Enchanted Circle

New England Sutra 2: Rivers and Ice

The river is covered
in ice and snow.

Beneath it though, the tide still rises
and falls.

While beneath the tide, the current flows.

But all I see is ice
and snow,

the material world within which
we think we know.

Beneath it, particles and waves of the quantum
universe show.

Beneath that is unmanifest though.

Some day the ice will melt and go; I'll see again
the tide rise and fall.

But only when I submerge myself will I know
the current.

Surrender, surrender, surrender, O!

Alan Watts Sutra: Expressions of Nature

We suffer from a hallucination,

from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms.

Most of us have the sensation that "I myself" is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body--a center which "confronts an "external" world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange.


Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. "I came into this world." "You must face reality." "The conquest of nature."

This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences.


We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.


As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.

This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated "egos" inside bags of skin.

from Alan Watts ‘The Book: On the Taboo of Knowing Who You Are’ xtremely formatted for this posting

New England Sutra: Nothing but Snow

There’s nothing anywhere here but snow.

The roads are covered in it and the air is speckled with it and every branch of every tree is frosted with it.

The world is turning white as if my ability to classify each and every thing has been suddenly found wanting.

Instead there’s one thing and one thing only.

It is holy with mystery and I catch it on my tongue like the host of some natural communion.

And now I know that I am snow too...

melting into nothing.

First There Is An Island Then There Is

No Island

As the tide decreases in Bar Harbor
twice a day, Bar Island, situated
opposite the town, across the harbor,
soon becomes no island, and the water
in-between the island and the village
soon becomes a narrow kind of isthmus
there instead, connecting town and headland.
Cars begin to cross the drying sandbar.
People walk their dogs along new shorelines.
Seagulls search for shellfish in the shallows.
Some nights, like tonight, the sun will lower
as the tide grows back into its fullness,
and the land transforms back into island
as the day returns into the darkness.

~Son Rivers 2002

Laughing at Reality

Attention to one's own Self, which is ever shining as 'I', the one undivided and pure reality, is the only raft with which the individual, who is deluded by thinking 'I am the body', can cross the ocean of unending births.'

Reality is simply the loss of ego. Destroy the ego by seeking its identity. Because the ego is no entity it will automatically vanish and reality will shine forth by itself. This is the direct method, whereas all other methods are done only by retaining the ego. In those paths there arise so many doubts and the eternal question 'Who am I?' remains to be tackled finally. But in this method the final question is the only one and it is raised from the beginning. No sadhanas are necessary for engaging in this quest.

There is no greater mystery than this — that being the reality we seek to gain reality. We think that there is something hiding our reality and that it must be destroyed before the reality is gained. It is ridiculous. A day will dawn when you will yourself laugh at your past efforts. That which will be on the day you laugh is also here and now.

~Ramana Maharshi in 'Be As You Are' ed. David Godman

Instant Karmic Enlightenment

I think Ram Dass (in 'Paths of God') has some important things to say concerning Jnana Yoga which are very translatable towards the Neo-advaita way or non-way, and what some call its fast food servicing of enlightenment.

The first thing is a general statement concerning intellectual spiritual practices in the west, that “we are coming out of a kind of sickness here... in the way in which we have overthought” so that “we have been intellectually way ahead of our hearts’ and bodies’ wisdom.”

I think this should serve great warning to any intellectual spiritual practice, and something that has made me stop and... think?

The second thing concerns Ramana’s practice of Self-Inquiry. He calls it a “beautiful method—if you can stand it!” Furthermore, he says, it’s a practice “that takes incredible intellectual discipline” and “the fiercest gyan method I know.”

Now, I see this as no critique of Self-Inquiry, but possibly a consideration concerning any method involving something like Instant Karmic Enlightenment.

I myself have benefited from both Sailor Bob’s method and Ramana’s practice. There have been times when I’ve known here and now what I am. But I have not yet experienced a carse-like disassociative new world order.

I’ve experienced moments. And I understand on an intellectual level. But this body-mind mechanism still feels separate most of the time, even though I know it isn’t.

So for me, these Ram Dass comments strike exactly to the heart of things.

Ram Dass and the Art of Karma Yoga

And today I read this, which in many ways states in other words what I've called the art of lucid dreaming.

So the karma yogi is the person who uses his or her life to come to God by listening for the dharmic act, acting without attachment to the outcome, all the while knowing she or he's not the actor, anyway. That’s the whole formula for turning our lives around and making them our spiritual practice.

Ram Dass in ‘Paths to God’

The listening is Attention; the acting is Guidance; and the knowing is Surrender.

So what that this was said more than thirty years ago. Actually it was said more than three thousand years ago.

Really it was never said, and there was no audience there to hear it.

The Art of Lucid Dreaming

There is an art to living that many point to. This summary is the result of months of query into the second dreaming that follows an initial waking, and to my mind, this is an important conclusion of sorts. Or rather a new beginning. The key elements are the following:

1. Surrender
After understanding that all is consciousness, surrender happens. Such surrender is the same as letting go the ego. But there are years and years of conditioning here, and the ego will still come and go, like a wayward thought arising in the mind. Simply not believing it is the active side of surrender.

2. Attention
Things happen in the manifest world in which we dream that invite our attention. Without, there are influences and signs (even synchronicities). Within, there are insights and intuitions (even clairvoyances). All of these are simply the foretellings of consciousness, ripples around the waves. Pay them attention. Or not.

3. Guidance
We appear to do within the dream. Like a canoe streaming in the rapids, we can attend to the insight and signs, guide our movement (this is where thought becomes our tool and not some mighty poor internal substitute for attention), and facilitate the journey. Or we can ignore them and suffer a rough ride. One way or the other, we are heading downstream the dream.

Surrender. Attention. Guidance. These are the three primary practices of lucid dreaming. Use them well when you find yourself outside the monastery, ashram, or cave.

Jed McKenna's Damndest Law of Attraction 3

erasing the line between dreamer and dream

It's not so much that someone ... can have what they want, but that their wants and needs are in natural harmony with their dreamstate circumstances. In other words. it's not that I can have anything I want, ...it's also that I wouldn't want anything I couldn't have. ...The difference between authentic and inauthentic desire is central to all this, but most people are completely cut off from their authentic desires.

(snip)

The way it really works is more of a seamless unfolding. It's not something you can improve, only impede. The only way you can make it work better is to remove ego from the equation.

(snip)

As soon as you start imposing your beliefs on the process, it necessarily begins to degrade. Even to impose your beliefs about time and space on the process, or your beliefs about causality and duality, is to diminish it. As soon as you start asserting your beliefs, you start closing it down to your level instead of opening yourself up.

(snip)

And since. furthermore, this process is really about conscious being, about who and what and where we are, developing a progressively deeper understanding of the process is synonymous with actual progress and growth.

(snip)

What we're talking about when we say manifestation is the true creative process wherein authentic desires become reality. Once you understand the desire part, then the becoming part takes care of itself.

(snip)

It's about taking control of your life and that means one thing: releasing it. Unconditional surrender. That's something to be done consciously and with clear intent, ...losing your life to find it.

(snip)

Unlike prayer, manifestation is a first and only resort. Once we understand what it really is and how it really works, it naturally becomes our sole mode of operating in the world: not just in getting what we want, but in knowing how to want and what to want: in knowing what to do and why to do it. Instead of a desperate plea for something we want, manifestation becomes our way of moving through life, of interfacing with the universe.

(snip)

But manifestation isn't specific. Its not just about getting what you want, it's about everything you do and how you do it and who you are and how you move through the world. It's about shaping the dreamstate and moving within it in this seamless confluence of self and not-self. Its the erasing of the line between dreamer and dream. You're not just manifesting a car or new shoes, you're manifesting yourself, and all the rest follows naturally and effortlessly from that.

Jed McKenna's Damndest Law of Attraction 2

trust the universe, not my little brain

We think miracles happen and prayers are answered only when it's something good: when it's in line with our hopes and desires which... are always fear-based. We don't acknowledge the same forces equally at work when the results are not in line with our hopes and desires. We're very selective in our perceptions. Good luck, bad luck, it's all the same: the ebb and flow of tides, it just gets interpreted differently.

(snip)

An ego-clad, fear-based being might use prayer or divination or manifestation to get the things they want... Once freed from egoic constraints. however. all such fear-driven wanting disappears and desire becomes very organic and non-specific. My prayer. if I were to utter one, might be for whatever's best, or that I should proceed without error, something like that.

(snip)

The Integrated State is seamless: it's without all these artificial boundaries and distinctions. such as one entity asking for something and another granting it. I want what's best and I trust the universe, not my little brain, to be the judge of what's best and how best to make it happen.

(snip)

When your eyes are open, you see everything and belief becomes irrelevant and forgotten... My point is that what people see in these occasional glimpses, by all these various names and explanations, is this ocean of being working in tireless, errorless perfection. That's what the dreamstate is, that's what we are, that's what consciousness is. You are nothing but consciousness, everything that tells you more than that is like a built-up crust of hard-packed emotional energy that has formed around you like a shell.

All true growth and development is first and foremost a process of chopping away this crust. Ego sends us searching in the direction of learning, of becoming more and adding on to ourselves, but everything we claim to seek lies in the opposite direction: of unlearning, of letting go, of reducing. We think the goal is to become someone. but the universe can only be ours when we become no one.

~Jed McKenna from 'Spiritual Warfare' xtremely edited for this posting

Say the Truth

One Thing

If I have to say one thing
I guess I have to say the truth,
but then again the truth is something
you can’t say. But poetry
is something said that cannot be

so said. So let me say this truth
that can’t be said in poetry
and so be said. The truth is this:
yes, nothing in the world is true.
The grass is green; the sky is blue.

~Son Rivers 15-Jun-2008

Jed McKenna's Damndest Law of Attraction 1

an imperceptible tendency toward rightness

Central ... is the element of trust, of patience, of non-meddling(,)... no ego making demands and insisting on ways and means, so events unfold in ways ego could never imagine or achieve.

(snip)

That's what the whole thing really is—life...—a free-flowing. dynamic, creative process.... Your whole life becomes a creative process, a nuanced allowing, an imperceptible tendency toward rightness and away from not-rightness, as refined and subtle as your mechanism of balance.

(snip)

(T)here are a bunch of books (that) promise ways of manifesting your desires, getting everything you want, but that's really the least of it, more like a pleasant side-effect.

(snip)

Everyone has some direct experience..., where they sense that there's more to life than meets the eye, that there's something going on that they don't see.

(snip)

Manifestation is the visible part ... (L)ittle successes ... aren't the exception, they're the rule, and when they don't come as requested. it just means you didn't understand the rule. But you can.

(snip)

Understanding it conceptually doesn't matter much.... Practical application is what matters.... The rest takes care of itself through natural processes of experimentation and observation and play, just like you developed your balance as a toddler. You weren't born with a finely-tuned balance mechanism: it developed over time as you got up and started using it.

(snip)

Your thoughts and emotions determine your dreamstate reality. That's where you start. From there it's just a matter of simplifying the equation and eventually seeing that your thoughts and emotions are your dreamstate. It's all just consciousness, you are just consciousness. There is nothing else. Once that goes from thought-level concept to full-immersion awareness, you naturally merge with the currents instead of being tossed about by them.

~Jed McKenna from 'Spiritual Warfare' xtremely edited for this posting

It’s All In The Intuition

There’s an interesting comparison of the Christian Trinity and the Hindu Sat-Chit-Ananda (Being-Consciousness-Bliss) in David Carse’s ‘A Perfect Brilliant Stillness’, in which God is Being, the Son is Consciousness, and the Holy Spirit is Bliss, or that untranslatable Transcendent Love.

God or Sat or Being, Unmanifest,
vibrates into the Son or Chit or Consciousness, Manifest,
and the bond between them is the Holy Spirit or Ananda or Bliss,
that Quantum Energy that science sees, or Quantum Spirit.
Of course all of this is One.

And it’s all that is. Our human lives are only dreams within that reality. But they are dreams that need to be lived. And that is my segue into a section of the Katha Upanishads, here translated (or transcreated) by Alan Jacobs:

Know the Self
As your own Consciousness, Awareness,
Vital Spiritual Life Energy,
Source of your own Being.
God in your Heart,
As if to be sitting as a passenger
In a golden chariot.
Your body, and object in Consciousness-Awareness,
Is the chariot,
Your subtle intellect
Is the charioteer,
And the reasoning power
Inherent in the brain is the reins.

The five wild rampant horse are the senses,
The objects they perceive
And the roads down which they rush headlong.
When the chariot and charioteer
Are in Union, that is Yoga
Of the body,
The senses,
The mind.
Wise people call the Self
The Enjoyer.

You, the dream, are the chariot, not the charioteer. And the Self, God, who you truly are, that Sat-Chit-Ananda, is the passenger riding in your chariot. But note that your reasoning mind is only the reins, the tools of the trade so to speak, and the actual charioteer is that subtle intellect called intuition.

In the dream, it’s intuition that should be doing the driving, not thought. And when you and your intuition are in harmony, well, God enjoys his Son or Daughter. Being Enjoys Consciousness. And your dream will live in the Holy Spirit of Love. Bliss.

Amen Svaha Quark

All You Need is Consciousness

...There is functioning in these body/mind organisms. There is physical functioning and there is mental functioning.

Physical functioning is experienced as bodily activity of various kinds.

Mental functioning is experienced as thoughts and mental activity.

And it is because of these activities, what the Buddhist tradition calls the skandhas, the thought processes, sensory perceptions, and so on, the functioning of the body/mind organism, that there is an assumption made that there is something, someone, here doing these things.

But that’s an unfounded assumption. To perceive that the skandhas are empty of an individual self doing them, is to awaken.

All there is, is Consciousness.

(snip)

That’s why we call this the dream; everything, including the body/mind organism you call yourself, does not exist as something separate in itself, but only as an apparent functioning in Consciousness.

There is no separate self or mind, only dream characters in Self or Consciousness.

There is only thinking happening in this apparent organism, in these dream characters. We experience this. We experience thoughts happening; but the assumption that they originate inside these heads in something we call a mind is an unwarranted leap.

It’s the basic misperception from which everything else, all of dualism, all of the illusion of separation, all samsara, follows.

David Carse in 'A Perfect Brilliant Stillness' (paragraphs re-formatted and portions italicized for this posting)

4 Way Dreams: Van, Thoreau, Ruiz, & Ramana

1. Disconnecting

There comes a point inside the dream when you start to see that the true vantage point is actually outside the dream.

But first you need to question the dream itself.

It might start slowly with some seeing of some disconnect. A long strange trip indeed.

For me, it started in the late Sixties with the Viet Nam war, and an understanding that things weren’t what they had been sold to be. So of course it took on a political counter-cultural tone. Lennon. Dylan.

Working Class Hero Tangled Up in Blue...

Moreover there was poetry and song. Walt Whitman and Van Morrison were my lyrical gurus: Song of Myself Into the Mystic. And there was lots of American literature as well, including a degree.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. So life happened for me, and conformities beckoned.

Until I fundamentally broke down.


2. Thoreauvian Interlude

Nature was prescribed and Thoreau became my doctor.

One summer I reread Walden, and I can’t tell you how many times I heard it said that Thoreau was fine for idealists, but not practical enough for the real world.

But he made more sense to me than anything I had ever come across in that world.

His genius resided not only in his common sense, but in his connection to a spiritual sense rooted in the earth itself. It wasn’t idealistic at all. It was truly grounded, and not lost in some rarified dream of lace and gold.

And then I decided to see how this country got to be what it was, and went back to school for a Masters in American History. I was sure something went wrong somewhere, until I realized it was wrong from the very start: I sided with the Anti-federalists.

The disconnect was increasing.

It wasn’t conformity this time that beckoned, but merely so-called responsibilities. While Acadia kept my sanity.

Until I was laid off, went Native, traveled to Arizona and experienced the eternal now in the Canyon del Muerte.


3. Awakening

Arriving back home I read Miguel Ruiz, and for the first time I knew a metaphysical explanation for that disconnect involving not only social conditioning, but more importantly the virtual reality of belief and the ego.

I felt as if I had discovered the meaning of life.

The disconnect was now not just some philosophical disagreement; it was as clear as the divide between sleep and waking. It was obvious that life was but a dream. And I was waking up inside of it.

Soon after I read Eckhart Tolle, and then quickly found myself in a world of Sacred Wisdom and Advaita, all the way from the Desert Fathers to Ramana Maharshi's most valuable all-important Who Am I, with folks like Adams, Adya, Jed, Sailor Bob, and many others, mixed inbetween.

And something recently has clicked. There’s more of a real understanding, as I remarked in a recent posting, of that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin quote: we are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.

In other words, we are not living in a dream. That still gives the dream the vantage point. Despite all the mystical experiences and feelings of unity with the divine, you are still in the dreaming.

Rather we are dreaming within eternity. I see the vantage point is not inside the dream. It’s outside the dream. It’s in eternity. There is no vantage point. There is no me. There’s only here and now and Being-Consciousness-Bliss.

The disconnect is disappearing.

Jed McKenna: Xtreme Spirituality

If you need a jolt in the battle that rages inside your head, try this out. If you dare! (You know who You are.) I really don't have much more to say about him than the title of this posting.

Jed McKenna on Amazon

.

An Unbelievable Blow-Out

The clock is running down, the batteries are dying, the car is running out of gas. I am surrendering to That which is. (No lie, just after writing that sentence, my cell phone sounded its low-battery warning.)

After all, ego is the big lie, and surrender is the only lie detector.

All my life I felt as if there was something better that I should be doing. But despite all my thinking, I couldn’t figure it out. So life happened.

But whenever I began to lose sight of that something better, whenever I was on the verge of going with the status quo, something rebelled within me (and without).

Ultimately, it was OK with delaying something better until the time was right, until certain responsibilities had played themselves through.

The time did come, but something better really didn’t. Instead something completely different did.

Surrender.

It’s unexplainable to those who may not understand, but let me quickly do so anyways. An energetic organization of consciousness; after evolving through processes of sense, memory, and instinct; and thereby becoming sensitive to the various forms and patterns of energy all around it; developed an ability to think; that is create a virtual reality within its mind. And in so doing, it created a separate sense of itself within that virtual reality. And at some point, it began to see that virtual reality as truth (belief), and that virtual self as itself (ego).

In turn, of course, there arose a continuous conflict between the actual reality and the virtual reality, or Consciousness and the Belief/Ego construct. This conflict can be called suffering. Suffering is like friction, in time may wear away the ego, and blow out! This is called an act of grace.

(Or, through the active grace of Self-Inquiry, asking Who Am I?, the same blow-out can occur.)

Then things begin to slow until surrender occurs. Stop.

The virtual reality and all its beliefs, and its sense of self, the ego, are seen through, and disappear. Reality returns. And action happens through intent or influence, desire or synchronicity.

It’s unbelievable.

The Secret of Manifesting Deuces

All this talk about the secret, manifestation, or intuition really requires one thing and one thing only. It’s that same old spiritual thing. And without it, all that talk is meaningless.

It’s like playing poker in a tennis match. It doesn’t really matter what is wild unless you recognize your side of the score has always been love.

In other words, lose the ego. See the dream for what it is. And be nothing. Now.

Otherwise, any intuition or intent will be lost in the noise of thought.

And rather than responding to the pull of the universe in the present, your action will be based on thought, which is really the pull of the universe from the past stored in memory, which means everything you do is based on a reality (or a dream) that doesn’t exist any longer.

So everything in your life is in a time delay, constantly rubbing against the current, the friction being what’s called suffering.

It’s like this. The universe might be telling you turn left, but you’re still reacting to some time in the past when you should have turned right. So this time you go right. Taking that turn one block way too late. When there isn’t even a road there on the right.

The result, of course, isn’t very pretty.

That, In Fact, In Truth, I Am

The Womb of Livelihood

I am an embryo
in uterus, secure

within four walls of books,
ten thousand objects, and

a few select divine
relationships with other

lovely embryos
in uterus as well.

I am an ultrasound
of solar winds. I am

a worshipper of worry
wrapped in fetal-like

position praying to
the amniotic fluids

and securities exchange.
I am unborn to that

celestial and quantum
energetic wonder

that, in fact, in truth,
I am, indeed, unborn.

~Son Rivers 04-Jul-08

Surrendering to Surrender

Surrender is a difficult if not dirty word inside the dream. Outside the dream it’s a joke.

A woman is falling from an airplane without a parachute. Does she surrender to the air?

There is only surrender. Any other option is a dream within a dream.

Start with the big things and then work backwards. Surrender to the inevitable process of aging and the unavoidable destination of death. There, that was easy.

It’s easy because it isn’t true. You are not really you. You are deathless, without beginning and without end and always now. There is no such thing as surrender. Always remember this.

So there is only surrender.

When I was a little child, I played with toy soldiers. Now that I am a grown man, I am the toy soldier. The Spirit that I really am, the I Am that I am, surrenders me.

I have no choice. I’ve been surrendered. Surrendering has happened. Pieces are moved. It’s either desire or demand. My orders are clear. I move.

To sum this up. The real You is Spirit. Spirit surrenders your dream character. Spirit moves the pieces on the game board. Some pieces are inside you. We call these pieces desire or intent (not to be confused with egoic want thoughts). Some pieces are outside you. We call these pieces influence or synchronicity. When it’s your turn to move, Spirit does so according to intent or influence, desire or synchronicity. And so the dream happens.

Suffering is caused by a futile opposition to this happening, resulting from a complete ignorance of everything previously stated in the previous paragraph. And then you die. Do not pass go.

Peace of mind is surrendering to the surrender. Go.

The Whole Enchilada

The world of spirituality is full of sayings that sound neat, and make you feel good, but mean much more than one is sometimes able or willing to understand. They are hand grenades that are treated like apples.

One of these is an oft-repeated maxim by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: we are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.

Sounds good and tastes right to any seeker. Yes, we are indeed spirit, one with the universe, eternal and full of light. Amen.

But for a moment, let’s think of the implication here. Really grasp the implication here. Understand completely, without any Disney-like coloring, the implication here.

We are not human beings!

We are spirit experiencing a dreamlike illusion called the human experience. The complete thing, the whole enchilada, is not real or true. Including many of the so-called spiritual beliefs and practices we play with. Especially those.

Society, culture, politics, religion, economics: all not real. And the you, you think you are. Not real. In fact, that’s the most unreal thing in your particular life.

And the only thing that needs to be addressed in any true spiritual practice.

That’s the thing, that thing called ego, that all the great and true spiritual traditions speak to. Lose the ego, see through the illusion of the ego.

In other words, know that you are not a human being. It’s all a dream, illusion, Maya. It’s the curtain behind which resides the truth: you are, and have always been, Spirit.

You’ve just been having a bad dream.

All Roads Go to Morocco

We talk about the spiritual path we’re on as if it’s something special and unique, and traveled by few. It isn’t and it isn’t, and it isn’t.

Whether we know it or not, we, each and every one, have been walking the spiritual path since time can remember. Just as if we know it or not, we are already at the final destination. We were born there.

Stop for a moment. Here and now. Look where you are.

Every moment of your life has brought you to this moment. Yes, that appears to be an innocent, and quite obvious. statement.

But I mean it in a much more radical way. The universe, call it Consciousness, God, Self, Atheistic-Randomizer, Spirit, has paved every step of the way for you to be exactly right here and right now. You weren’t aware because you didn’t know it at the time. That’s why it appeared so random and often so difficult.

Or as if there was no path at all.

But now that you’ve stopped, now that you’ve looked, now that you know What you really are, you can see that the Self has made this road for itself.

It might be a dream, but you're not the only one dreaming it.

So stay stopped. Surrender to your Self. Pay attention to the signs and messages the Self creates for the self, and then, dream on. Walk on.

Follow. Intend.

And like Bogie and Rains at the end of Casablanca, it shall be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

What Micro Assumes, Macro Shall Assume

1.

Our bodies are self-intelligent. They breathe, beat heart, circulate blood, and a myriad of other functions on their own, with no action needed from ourselves. It is an intelligence beyond our doing.

As in the microcosm, so in the macrocosm.

Therefore, as previously stated, the manifest world, Quantum Spirit, is sentient with Divine Intelligence.


2.

To clarify, Quantum Spirit is one with Spirit. To repeat, the unmanifest becomes manifest as Spirit vibrates into different forms and patterns in order to cognize itself.

Now, there are two basic types of forms and patterns in Quantum Spirit.

First is the Universal Organization of Quantum Spirit. These are the basic building blocks of the universe ending in the atoms and molecules we know and love. Take carbon or water, for examples.

But secondly, there is the Local Organization of Quantum Spirit. On Earth, this is basically what we call life, be it vegetable or animal (or other).


3.

For all intents and purposes, this Local Organization results in a wondrous amplification of Divine Intelligence, the Human Being being a particular local apex at this time and place of that amplification in the human point of view.

But again, it is important to remember that an organization is merely a temporary gathering of that elementary substance, which is itself an organic unity, One.

As in the microcosm, so in the macrocosm.

We know ourselves to be one organic body despite the myriad organs and muscles and bones etc (forms and patterns). As in our body, so in the universe.

Moreover, every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you (Whitman).

Thoreau and I Am the Damndest Thing

Put aside all opinions, beliefs and theories for a moment and address this one simple question: What do you know for sure? Or. as Thoreau put it:

Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion. and appearance. that alluvium which covers the globe... through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place. which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake: and then begin...

In other words, let's cut the crap and figure out what we know for sure. The cogito does exactly that, and it's very simple. The question is: What do you know?

The answer is: I Am.

All other so-called facts are really non-facts and belong in the category of consensual reality and relative truth, i.e.. unreal reality and untrue truth.

~Jed McKenna in 'Spiritual Warfare'

Quantum Organization One

There is the seen and the unseen, the physical world and the spiritual world, the manifest and the unmanifest.

Both worlds are sentient with Divine Intelligence. For this reason, for my own Understanding, I prefer to call the seen and the unseen, Quantum Spirit and Spirit.

(Sailor Bob Adamson describes the unmanifest becoming manifest as Awareness vibrating into different forms and patterns in order to cognize itself. I so love that description.)

Quantum Spirit consists of an elementary organic substance that we see as individual particles or waves, depending on one’s viewpoint, that have organized (through Divine Intelligence) to form the manifest world.

It is important to remember that the physical world is a world determined to be so by the subjectivity of our five senses, in combination with our nervous system and brain.

In other words, rather in William Shakespeare's words, there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophies.